Local Papers Give Extra Effort

Newspapers showed a lot of initiative in coverage of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, but in an age of instant communications, TV has an advantage when it comes to covering breaking international stories — especially when they can provide footage of jetliners ripping through two of the tallest buildings in the world.

Every hour, it seemed, there was a new development, and television was on top of it all the way, with the national networks airing coverage for basically 24 hours a day starting Sept. 11 and in the days immediately following.

Northwest Arkansas TV stations primarily provided on-the-street reactions from locals and coverage of candlelight vigils in their newscasts. It was sometimes excruciating to suffer through the local news angles waiting for the national news to return and bring us more of the unfolding story.

Even the earliest printed accounts, “extra” editions published the afternoon of Sept. 11, were already outdated by new developments breaking on TV. If you had time to log on to the Internet, though, most papers were busy posting new stories about the disaster throughout the day on their Web sites.

An example of the dominance of TV reporting on Sept. 11 can be seen on Page 1 of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s eight-page extra published that afternoon.

Under the headline “Who Would Do This?”, the D-G extra contained the worst quality picture we have ever seen on the front page of any publication. The reason? The 11.5 by 12.5-inch photograph was taken from a television set. The logo of Little Rock’s KARK-TV, Channel 4, an NBC affiliate, can be seen in the lower right hand corner. Initially, we thought the headline meant “Who would run such an awful picture?” The photo was credited to The Associated Press.

The Morning News of Springdale used a similar AP picture on the front of an eight-page extra it published the same day, but its photo wasn’t distorted by the pixels of a glowing TV tube. It appeared to be directly from the AP wire.

Both newspapers did a good job on coverage and providing local angles in the extras, but they couldn’t keep pace with television. We saw one man, sitting in a Fayetteville bar about 5 p.m. on Sept. 11 watching CNN. He picked up the D-G extra and said, “This is all old news.”

The D-G distributed its free extra to 75,000 people in central Arkansas and 65,000 in Northwest Arkansas. It was the newspaper’s first extra since 1991, when it published two: for Bill Clinton’s decision to run for president and Operation Desert Storm.

The Morning News printed 13,000 extras that were sold for 25 cents each in local news racks and distributed another 7,200 to area schools. It was the newspaper’s first extra since a tornado hit Springdale in 1970, killing one man, said Executive Editor Jim Morriss.