Summary
I have found the information given on this text really interesting. The events that happened on September 11 changed so many areas in the world, that almost nothing kept working on the same way. And that evidently was reflected on the net, and more concretely on the online media. The text demostrates that, at that moment, digital publications were not prepared to respond to the whole necessity of the societies, but taking into account the inmaturity of the online media, we can say that the results were quite satisfactories. Online newspapers gave information to their users (some on that information was false and there were no rectifications, which is the negative part of the situation) and that's how many people reached to the events earlier than other times.
Uxue Garro Irastorza
Journalism 61 - 4th Year
Changeable Monograph III - Online Journalism
The terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on 9/11 definitely made a difference on our society: apart from being the most dramatic live news ever, it was the most watched one in the history of television as well. Furthermore, this event initiated a huge news coverage by newspapers and magazines from all over the world. Summarizing, we can say it was a great coverage challenge for any single communication media, the biggest one ever. And, certainly, it concluded being a maturity test for online media: September 11 was the opportunity to measure the technical and professional development acquired by the digital media the first days of the 21st century.
This article focuses on online media, concretely on a sample of 18 online newspapers from nine different countries, although the biggest amount of information cames from the Spanish case, and more precisely from and : the first one is the online edition of El País, the most read newspaper in Spain (433,617 copies on 2001); the second one is the internet edition of , the second biggest newspaper (312,366 daily copies). The other 16 are international online newspapers and some information offered by searching engines like Google is also considered.
News Relevance of September 11 Events
That day events had some peculiarities (the devastation in one of the most significant areas of Manhattan, a serious damage on the Pentagon...), but there other circumstances that also help to magnify the situation: space and time.
-The Space Factor
The main events occurred in the heart of one of the most popular urban places: at the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, and that was a significant factor to the iconic impact. Apart from that, the Pentagon was attacked, and its image of secrecy and invulnerability contribute to magnify the event.
-The Time Factor
The attackes started at 8:46 a.m. in New York, which allowed the maximum live media coverage in almost every single western society. The events happened so fast that they caused an information beat.
So, briefly, this two factors helped to spread the shock caused by the events among the citizens worldwide.
Regarding to the internet, the 9/11 users turned to it looking for information. As a matter of fact, 80 per cent of the 500 most searched words of that day in Google were related to the terrorist attacks.
The Weaknesses of Online Newspapers on the News Coverage of September 11 Events
9/11 showed a huge lack of material and organizational anticipation, that caused different problems
-Lack of Technological Foresight
The traffic of the internet was widely incremented few time after the first attacks and due to this massive multiplication of audience, many online newspapers and other interactive media collapsed. For example, according to the Keynote Business 40 Internet Performance Index, , and The New York Times on the Web offered zero percent accessibility the hour after the first attack. And not only those media have that kind of problem, because other online newspapers also reduced the access.
In order to resolve the problem, many publications reduced the quantity of text and graphic elements in a drastic manner. This occurred not only in the US, but all over the world. Concretely, 8 out of 18 online medias of the sample had problems maintaining their original standards the following three hours after the first attack.
Curiously, the most prestigious newspapers were the ones which expreienced the biggest problems with their services; the smaller papers had an increase on their amount of visits, but their services were not collapsed.
-Lack of Editorial Prudence
During the nearly two hours lapse of time between the first airplane impact against the North Tower of the World Trade Center and the fall of the South Tower, there was a sudden avalanche of news, and the online newspapers had to act rapidly.
On this rush for giving information, online newspapers were one of the media outlets in which information errors most occurred. In Spain, one of the examples could be the online edition of El Mundo: two hours and 16 minutes after the beginning of the attacks, it published diverse headlines and as later was confirmed, two out of three were false. They attributed to "news wires" and they didn't published any correction. However, this kind of error were not exclusive to any single newspaper.
But, in this way, online newspapers became the inclusion of errors and omissions' notes a common practice, which did not happened on printed versions.
So, in conclusion, this notable information errors could have been avoided if they had been more cautious. In that sense, it seems that online media journalists give more importance to speed than to accuracy and adopt some image of impunity justified with that.
-Lack of Own Identity
It takes a time to the media to achieve a maturity and to find their place on the universe of information and the online media, which has no much more than 10 years, is just starting this process.
In this beginning, newspapers' online editions had an identity problem. They worked on a duplicity: they had the analytical and interpretative information element, but they tend to provide immediate and concise information as well. In order to inform about September 11 attacks, not all the online newspapers chose the same aspect of the duplicity, although some points were common.
The main one was the effort to publish breaking news, with continuous information updates. Some newspapers modified their character as well and some others tried to combine last-minute news with a more analytical treatment of information. a good example of this last one was El País. It removed all the content realted to other facts to offer exclusively information about the attacks, and immediately after the events, it started publishing infographics and other multimedia resources. Nevertheless, that was the exception.
Strengths of the Online Newspapers
Despite the failures, there were positive parts. This events helped to show the development of the multimedia and the potential of hyperlinking and interactivity.
-The Definitive Consolidation as Media
9/11 demostrated that the online media was an autonomous communication medium, with its particular character and its own audience: an average of 11.7 million North Americans visited news websites everyday the week after the attacks. The increase of audience lasted long time, even in Spain. The digital editions of tha main newspapers almost doubled the number of visits between August and October 2001. In the long term, between september and the end of 2001, and almost tripled their visits.
The information experience of that day led some users discover the online newspapers and consult them with some regularity. Curiously, the growth in user amount coincide with the hardest months for online media in economical terms.
-Development of Multimedia Information Synergies
One of the main challenges communication companies experienced was the correct coordination between their different media outlets, so they serve better information to different audiences; they produce coherent and complementary news coverage using these media. After that, the next step in short term was to achieve an adequate multimedia synergy. Some media companies were able to complement their news offer through the use of different outlets.
-Implementation and Development of New Interactive Journalistic Formats
Technology and software have advanced a long way since the last years of 1990 decade, regarding to the multimedia content. Because of that, news and information formats in online newspapers suffered a huge evolution: they offered textual contents almost exclusively.
This technological development combined perfectly with the needs of the news content created by the September 11 attacks, that asked for the use of multimedia genres, not just simple text. The significant amount of graphic information newspapers received helped on this quest for new visual formats. In Spain, El País and El Mundo's digital editions produced graphics that became relevant internationally. In 's case, their infographics achieved to be pieces of news that explained with the utmost precision what had happened in US and how. Thanks to that, they were really visited by users.
The final change in multimedia aspect was that after 9/11 some media started understand the use of offering text, static and dynamic images and sounds together, and not like separate pieces.
Conclusions
The main idea of this text is that online pubblications are not in their maturity yet. Firstly, because after September 11 events, it was clear that interactive media are not technologically consolidated, so that cannot guarantee a stable connectivity. Secondly, related to their insufficient editorial maturity, which leads them to commit important mistakes reporting news. And finally, the role of interactive media is not defined.
Online pubblications have consolidated as a clear source of information in developed countries. This has given to them an opportunity to collaborate with traditional media. Onplus, synergy is possible in many ways.
In conclusion, 9/11 encourage some online communication tools to try new formats so they could take full advantage of the communication potentials of the web.
Commentary
Journalism 61 - 4th Year
Changeable Monograph III - Online Journalism
