The stand-off between print and Web reporters dissolved, however, under the impact of a national tragedy. Just after a quarter to nine on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, Deputy Online Editor Goldie heard an explosion from her apartment. It was American Airlines Flight 11 slamming into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, but Goldie thought it was a bomb. [1] “I called Amanda [Barrett],” Goldie recalls. “I said, they’re blowing up the World Trade Center.” The Newsday Web team sprung immediately into action. “We had it up [on Newsday.com] within three minutes of the plane hitting the building,” Goldie says of the site’s response. “We were the first ones, and we were online for Chicago and LA and all of them.”Goldie lived five blocks from the World Trade Center and was able to send Barrett updates on breaking news as they occurred.

As the enormity of the day’s events became clear, Newsday , including its Web teams in Queens and Long Island, kicked into crisis mode. Diane Davis , the deputy metropolitan editor for the print edition, helped manage the herculean task of collecting, processing, and organizing information (“feeds”) from reporters in scattered locations, and formulating them into coherent news articles. [2] Davis, who usually started the day by calling her reporters and assigning them stories and locations for the following day’s paper, sent dozens of reporters to cover different angles of a massive event. The imperative that morning, Davis says, was getting reporters to the scene as fast as possible. “The number one rule is go,” she says, “because you have to get there when it’s happening. You can never get those moments back if you lose ground.” Reporters’ assignments ranged from covering Ground Zero, the FBI, and City Hall, to tracking down victims and their families.

Once the reporters were on the scene, they began calling in feeds to editors back in Queens and Long Island, and Davis had to organize how best to take in that information and store it in a central location. Using the HERMES content management system, Davis labeled each feed with the reporter’s initials and the topic covered, a label known as a “slug.” It was then accessible in the central database to any editor or writer for use in compiling a story. Each slug was also grouped under different mega-stories, or “budgets,” some of which were open to all while others were in private “queues.” Stories were quickly edited and checked against other articles to catch contradictions, mistakes, and the like. Meanwhile, editors looked for matching photography, art or graphics that not only fit with an individual story but was also synchronized with the paper’s overall coverage. Simultaneously, the Web staff updated Newsday.com with breaking news, often using the same slugs as the print staff.

In a hectic newsroom that was simultaneously working on Web and print editions in a fluid crisis situation, it was vital that everyone followed the same protocol. This was a marked departure from reporting on a regular day. “Reporters are, in some ways, more used to working on their own,” Davis says. “I go out, I cover stories in my notebook, I go back, I write the parts I want to tell you. And a story like this… you couldn’t just keep it to yourself. It had to be something that you shared with a team because many people were looking at that information for many different things.”

9/11 on the Web. Newsday.com had become fully automated less than a month before the terrorist attacks. This meant several Web staffers could access and update the site at once, and they no longer had to manually code everything. Though this made Newsday.com easier to manage, the staff was still learning how to deal with the new software.

The automation, however, allowed the Web team to update Newsday ’s site almost instantaneously with news flashes, giving visitors to the site almost live coverage—a first for the Internet. “We were able to keep the site moving from all over the place,” Newsday.com Executive Producer McCarthy recalls.

It was all Ground Zero, all the time, and we were able to put so much more content out there…We did updates. We did advisories. We did live running stories about the missing, and we built a database of the missing on the fly. We had slide shows of all the pictures…You had so much stuff that you had to get out there that…by the time you turned around and looked at the home page, there was just so much information out there. [3]

Newsday.com attracted so many information-hungry visitors on 9/11 and in the chaotic aftermath that the site crashed several times. [4]

As the Web staff rushed to keep up on 9/11, the fear and confusion of that day inevitably seeped into some of the online coverage, leading to small but significant mistakes. In the first hours of the crisis, for example, Newsday.com initially reported that a small plane had crashed into the World Trade Center, rather than the much larger, fuel-laden Boeing 767. [5] There were also reports of a bomb at the White House, reports that ultimately proved false. [6]

At other times, there were conflicting reports swirling about the newsroom—that more planes were headed towards New York City, for instance. [7] Unlike a normal print cycle where a story would have time to mature and pass through several editorial layers, the Web team had to make the call to run the story or not right then and there. McCarthy says that, in updating such a rapidly evolving story so frequently, the Web team tried to be as transparent as possible about its coverage. “We had this advisory box on the page, that you would just type in like two sentences to let people know what was going on,” he says. “And if we found out that we put up something that wasn’t true, we would just write back like, oh, this is false, this what really happened.” [8]

Some mistakes, however, proved stickier than others. Internet News Manager Amanda Barrett, new to the job and responsible for many of the updates that day, remembers one such incident: CNN reported that a fire truck had been found in the rubble at Ground Zero, and Newsday.com decided to go with the story. It soon proved untrue. Barrett rewrote the story, but the mistake came back to haunt her. “It really stuck with us because it was mentioned a couple of times to me by staffers, who didn’t work on the Web, who said that we were fast, [but] we weren’t thorough,” she says. [9]

Though the speed and intensity of the Web coverage of 9/11 drove many staffers to exhaustion, the experience of covering such a huge and fluid event brought Newsday.com fully into the new-media era. “All of a sudden, there was this need to know,” McCarthy says of the experience. “And it was kind of crazy.”

The Rockaways. One area of Long Island was especially hard hit by the 9/11 attacks. Many of the police officers and firemen who died in the World Trade Center collapse lived in the predominantly Irish-Catholic Rockaways, located on the Rockaway Peninsula of Long Island. Fully two months after the attacks, the St. Francis la Sales Church of the Rockaways Belle Harbor neighborhood, for example, was still holding funerals for 12 rescue workers recovered from the rubble. [10] Though they were remote and difficult to reach from other parts of New York, the Rockaways were located in the borough of Queens, making them part of Newsday ’s home turf. In the months after September 11, the paper covered the local fallout from the attacks extensively.