Part of my morning routine is to look for front pages. I check Newseum. I check Kiosko. I check the Twitter and Facebook feeds of places where news is happening, such as Kenya on Friday.
Newspapers have had a tough time for awhile now, but when something big happens, we still share their front pages digitally. I saw them everywhere after Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson almost one year ago, after the murders at Charlie Hebdo in Paris in January and after the Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage ruling last month. The (Charleston, South Carolina) Post and Courier’s Sunday front page after nine people were murdered was so powerful. So is the art that the (Fitchburg, Massachusetts) Sentinel and Enterprise has published since an artist took over its front page for 26 days.
Of course, front pages can’t keep up with the latest news on the Web. Some newspapers, like the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, now use that space to share the biggest story of the day, not the newest. When I click through the digital versions each morning, they convey a sense of place and time that I don’t feel on news home pages. Lots of people on Twitter had fun after seeing The (Oklahoma City, Oklahoma) Oklahoman’s Fourth of July front. But that front, along with the front page prayer published daily, gave me a pretty solid sense of that community.
I’ve made a lot of front page collections for Poynter. Together, I think they show how newspapers capture big stories in snapshots that are purposefully insulated from the rapid pace of the Web. For a daily look at how newspapers preserve the news indelibly with front pages, check out Poynter’s Front Page of the Day Tumblr.
Note: This video was updated to include Liberation.
