By Vincent F. Safuto staff writer
October 19, 2002
One of the billions of facts that emerged from the Sept. 11 attacks was one that seems odd in our electronic age: Newspapers experienced a brief bump in readership.
On the surface, it's puzzling. The World Wide Web has become an information source, and the latest news and pictures of the attacks appeared very quickly. But many people still turned to newspapers the next morning.
Some papers made "extra" afternoon editions on Sept. 11, while others (including the Press Journal) decided to gather news for a larger paper and a larger press run on Sept. 12.
Why, in this age of the Web, did people want a copy of not only the Press Journal but so many other papers?
The reason may be that, while the Web offers news quickly and cable-news channels can show events live, there's a permanence to the "hard copy." You can keep it to show to future generations.
Indeed, one of my childhood memories is seeing some of the newspapers from the days surrounding the assassination of JFK. Someone in my family saved them, and it was fascinating to see not only the news coverage and the many sidebars but also the advertisements and comic strips from a time when I was still a baby.
On my last visit to New York, one of my uncles, in going through part of his garage, found a paper bag containing newspapers from the day World War II ended in the Pacific. It was fascinating to read the stories of the celebrations that went on that day, and see the other, more mundane parts of the paper as well.
You can read about the Pacific war in countless history books and watch it on the History Channel, but those crumbling old newspapers had a lot of information that isn't normally available.
I'm sure someone somewhere was taping on his or her VCR the Sept. 11 coverage as it happened, and there's a Web site (www.archive.org) that's saving old Web pages and has an archive of news sites devoted to the Sept. 11 attacks.
But for years to come, I'm sure closets and attics will have newspapers from the day of the attacks and the days that followed.
Back when I started working on news Web sites, there was little thought to saving them for future reference. Maybe we were shortsighted or just too busy trying to learn how to use the new medium. But it never occurred to us to save those front pages of our sites, though we did save the pages linked to from the front.
Time has brought understanding, though, and many Web sites now save their old front pages. The Internet Archive is a fascinating look back at not only Sept. 11 but the early days of the Web, with many famous sites as they looked back in the mid-1990s.
Call me sentimental for the old ways, but while I use the Web for breaking news, a pile of newspapers still gets my vote as the best way to preserve history and historic events for future generations. It seems others feel that way, too.
Vincent F. Safuto is a copy editor for the Press Journal. Reach him at (Vincent.Safuto@scripps.com).
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