September 11 Fades from the Headlines
Eleven years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the anniversary has faded from the front pages of three of the New York City's most visible newspapers, The New York Times The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Post. At The Times, which last year ran an elaborate web package and extensive coverage of the attacks' anniversary, the only mention of the anniversary currently on the home page is a small news story about scaling back anniversary commemorations and a City Room roundup of local events. That's a deliberate choice, Times public editor Margaret Sullivan wrote, although "Wednesday’s paper will offer coverage of the reading of the names, an event at which emotional photos are very likely."
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The Journal was the paper most directly affected by the attacks. The paper's former newsroom, before it was purchased by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., was across the street from the World Trade Center, at 200 Liberty St., and yet it still managed to produce a Sept. 12 paper as editors scattered to satellite offices and filed from laptops at home. It won a Pulitzer prize for breaking news reporting for its coverage of the attacks. The only mention of the anniversary on the paper's home page is a story on the muted New York City ceremony marking the attacks.
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The Post, also owned by News Corp., is leading its website with a story on a teacher-student affair at a city private school, but five of the stories in its "latest news" index have to do with the anniversary, including one about a daughter following in her father's footsteps as a cop, an AP story on the national commemorations, and an AP story on the campaigns marking the date, in the top three spaces.
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The rest of the city's papers splashed the anniversary on their front pages, and Poynter has a roundup worth reading this morning with images of all of them except The Post. Poynter's Andrew Beaujon and Julie Moos summed up the coverage in non-New York papers serving areas affected by the attacks:
Long Island’s Newsday and the Newark, N.J., Star-Ledger also serve readerships that were heavily affected by the attacks; both turn their fronts over to 9/11 coverage. The Washington Post runs only a small photo of a smoking World Trade Center, and nothing from the nearby Pentagon, on the bottom left of its front page. And the Somerset, Pa., Daily American, which serves the area where Flight 93 went down, fronts two photos of remembrances at the memorial in Shanksville, Pa.
Poynter has a good roundup of 9/11 anniversary front pages, including the New York Daily News, which fronts with an image of redeveloped Ground Zero.
