An inmature medium

Sumary:

Without a doubt, 11 September 2011 will remain as a day for history. A few days after the attacks, the weekly magazine The Economist chose for its cover a significant headline, “The Day the World Changed” over a picture of a smoky, dusty cloud hiding Manhattan’s new skyline without the World Trade Center’s towers. The terrorist attacks on the New York and Washington that day are certainly a milestone on our history. And few doubt that this was a historical day for journalism as well. The attacks were the most dramatic live news ever, and the most watched event in the history of television. At the same time, the attacks initiated some of the biggest news coverage ever produced by newspaper and magazines from every corner of the world.

During those hours, all the media were confronted with an overflowing information demand that they had to fulfil. Radio and television made information marathons, in witch they cross-cut live images of the towers and film repetitions of the impacts with interviews with witnesses and experts.

This article discusses to what extent the interactive media passes that technological and editorial test. News coverage of those events caused unknown technological demands of online publications all over the world. Briefly, September 11 was the opportunity to measure the grade of both technical and professional development reached by the digital media at the beginning of the 21^st century. This article studies a sample of 18 online newspaper from nine different countries. In the first case, “El País” is the most widely read newspaper in Spain with an average daily circulation of 433,617 copies in 2001. The second is “El Mundo”, witch at the time was the second largest in circulation among the Spanish print dailies with 312,366 copies daily.

What happened in New York and Washington on 11 September 2001 had some peculiarities, difficult to repeat by any other event. The factors that contributed to magnify this media impact could be summed up as two: space and time.

In the space factor, the fact that the main events occurred at the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York, contributed to their iconic impact. Besides, both places (the Twin Towers and Pentagon) assured a maximum exposure for the media, even a breaking news situation. Hundreds of journalists and cameras could access the affected areas very quickly, in such way that the event could be watched, literally, live, as it was happening, and from multiple points of view.

In the time factor, also the timing of the September 11 events, as well as the pace of development of what was occurring, contributed to their spectacular nature and their media impact. This coverage was not limited to broadcasters and online media. Newspapers also had enough time to prepare special editions about the events and many.

From a purely narrative point of view, the rhythm of development of events produced a frantic information beat, almost like in a feature film, in witch things were happening minute by minute. That said, what did happen specifically on the internet? In fact, the World Wide Web suddenly became the platform towards which users massively rushed to search for information. According to Google, during the two hours following the stars of the attacks, an average of 6000 searches of the acronym “CNN” were performed every minute. And, as a matter of fact, 80 percent of the 500 most searched words of that day in Google were related to the terrorist attacks.

September 11 events caught the world by surprise. Some of the deficiencies that could be observed are as follows.

- Lack of technological foresight. The experience of September 11 meant a key test of the internet as a network. A few minutes after the news of the first attack was broadcast, the internet had to respond to a sudden multiplication of traffic. Different services in charge of monitoring the browsing speed in the web point at the fact that the internet as a whole responded satisfactorily to the test. In fact, although to a lesser extent that other media outlets, the internet was used by millions of people on many different ways. Regarding, the online media, and again according to Keynote index, USAToday.com reduced its accessibility to 18.2 percent and MSNBC to 22.0 percent.

This drastic reduction in the accessibility to online media did not only occur in the US, but also affected digital publications in the other parts of the world. Most of the newspapers reduced their graphical offer to the minimum. Among other, newspapers such as Le Monde, Die Welt, Clarin, El Mundo, which practically doubled its average daily traffic, experienced serious accessibility problems due to the sudden avalanche of users searching the latest breaking news.

In fact, the most prestigious newspapers, those that usually attract a grater number of visitors, were precisely the ones who experienced the greatest problems keeping their services on the internet active.

- Lack of editorial prudence. In the face of this sudden and unexpected avalanche of news, the online newspaper had to act rapidly. Online newspaper ere one of the media outlets in which haste resulted most evidently in information errors. This lack of editorial prudence confirmed the fears of Fred H. Cate about online sources. From this point of view, expressed before the popularization of the internet as a platform for news delivery, online media would have more problems that other media outlets in terms of accuracy and reliability due to their structural characteristics. Cate underlines the fact that the unstoppable trend to digitalization could lead to an easier manipulation of data. Since there wouldn’t be a physical registry of any information; in addition, he indicates that online networks tend to speed up the flow of information in multiple directions, which reduces the tine and opportunity for checking data. In Spain, one of the examples that can be recalled is the case of the internet edition of the nations newspaper El Mundo . In our sample of 18 screenshots of online newspapers, we have found at least three more cases in witch false news was published.

In this way, the online newspaper stand from the print versions, were including errors and omissions notes in common practice. It seems as though online editions understand the evanescent character of digital media as justification for impunity and that it isn’t necessary to correct errors, since they do not stay written, in black and white somewhere. However, it is important to stress the fact that, in this case, even the print newspaper were not completely free of information errors, which were not rectified afterwards either. It seems that online media journalists tend to give more importance to speed that to accuracy, and that they adopt some sense of impunity justified by this need for speed.

- Lack of own identity. Internet publications, barely 10 years of age, have just begun their particular process of development and independence. The news coverage of September 11 clearly showed that, by that time, the internet newspaper were still in their youth. In these beginnings, newspapers’ web editions certainly face an identity problem. They tend to integrate the characteristics of a networked computer environment. The most evident common denominator among all the internet newspapers was probably the effort to publish breaking news. The newspapers included continuous information updates, trying to keep up with the frantic pace of the events in the US and to attend to the unceasing information, some newspapers modified not only their standard layout, but their character as well. Other newspapers, however, tried to combine last minute news with a more analytical treatment of information. Nevertheless, this kind of outstanding professionalism was the exception. Most online newspapers, whether due to a lack of anticipation or a lack of news staff, hesitated when the time arrived as to how to define the kind of news coverage the events deserved. And this hesitation is a clear sign the journalistic identity of digital publications still remains unresolved.

Of course, not everything about news coverage of the September 11 events by the internet press was a failure. Maybe not so clearly during the rush of the first hours due to the problems already explained, but certainly in the days and weeks after, that experience contributed to the improvement of online newspapers. Therefore, September 11 may be considered as a key date for the consolidation of certain strengths that are described in the following.

If we pay attention to the news sites we clearly see the importance and scale of this increase in usage. An average of 11.7 million North Americans visited news websites every day during the week after the tragedy. The audience of news category increased by about 80 percent during the week ending 16 September, compared to the previous week. This growth of audience on the internet media worldwide lasted a long time, especially in the case of online newspapers. After experiencing an audience peak during the days right after the attacks, the web editions of the man dailies experienced a sustained upward trend in their audiences.

About the implementation and development of news interactive journalistic formats, the text said, that since the late 90’s technology and software have advanced very quickly in the field of multimedia content. However, the evolution of the new multimedia applications, and particularly Macromedia Flash, made possible a qualitative jump in the formats and information genres for the web.

This technological development coincided on September 11 with a kind of news content hat, due to its richness in images and sounds, asked for the use of multimedia genres far beyond simple text. In the same way, the quantity and quality of this graphic information encouraged the online newspapers to produce a great amount of interactive infographics with advanced uses of interactivity and, especially, of hypertextuality and multimediality.

Probably the best example of these new genres is found in the US. One company that, without a doubt, was ahead of the experiments with new multimedia information formats was MSNBC. MSNBC published a great number of special reports, such as “The Darkest day”, which are remarkable achievements in journalistic narrative on the internet. This multimedia experience, as MSNBC called it, brings to the reader/watcher the possibility of an interactive, multimedia and hypertextual account of the events, in which text, sounds, images and navigation are extremely well integrated in one unique narrative discourse.

As conclusion, first of all, the case of September 11 proves that, at the beginning of the 21^st century, interactive media are not technologically consolidated yet and, despite their worldwide character, they are not in a condition to a guarantee a stable connectivity. Second, these media show an insufficient editorial maturity that occasionally leads the to commit important mistakes in their news reporting.

However, not everything is gloomy. As been shown in this article, news coverage of September 11 by internet newspaper involved a clear display of the potential that these media can offer.

Comment:

In my opinion, the article is good to know all about the coverage of the attacks. Those days all the information come very fast, and with this article I have learned that maybe all the information was not entirely successful. The online media on September 11 wasn’t prepared to give us all the information. This kind of media was a new media, that at the time, was growing up. I think that moment was the beginning of the online medium we know today. In this article its talk about the lack of coverage, own identity, editorial prudence... In my opinion, I can understand about those lacks, because the online media was new for all the people. Besides, all the information was new for all, knowing that the attacks were one of the most important attacks in the world.

Cesar Etxebarria. Group 31.

Journalism 4.

Changeable monograph III