When the news is unprecedented, devastating, and developing unpredictably, how do you plan your front page?
You can hardly help being swept up in the emotional roller coaster of the news. But while you are working through the day to make sense of the news, you can look ahead, come together with colleagues, and plan a thoughtful, constructive next edition for your readers.
Think first about what you want your readers to experience when they pick up the paper in the morning. Their information needs likely will have been met by television (or, if servers are upgraded and traffic finally flows, the Web). What do they need from their newspaper the morning after such a sinister and shocking tragedy?
- They need who, what, why, when, and where in the most scannable fashion possible, as a quick reference, since those basics will have been widely reported already. Consider reducing the basic facts of the story to quick bullet points or a graphic showing the sequence of explosions in a simple, well-organized format. This goes against traditional “paper of record” thinking, of course. But are we producing newspapers for historians or for our communities?
- They need information to put the acts of terrorism in perspective. As much as possible, they need a sense of who is behind the tragedies and how they were able to act so destructively without detection. They need an understanding of any safeguards that can make life seem manageable again. Readers will be asking: How could this have happened? How can it be stopped from happening again? What kind of world are we living in?
- They need to feel a connection to the community, as a way to process the grief and shock of the events. This is a time for newspapers to put the news in as local a context as possible. In Sarasota, readers will be thinking about the president being in town when the news broke and having to fly back to Washington. In Pittsburgh, they’ll be processing the reports of a local plane crash that may or may not have been connected to the terrorism. In Norfolk, a military city, most residents will be on alert as never before. In New York and Washington, an unheard-of sense of vulnerability will permeate life for the next few weeks, at least.
Choose story forms, images, and headlines with the goal of helping the community — helping people to understand, to cope, to grieve. This is a time for public-service journalism in content as well as form.
