Overwhelming Coverage

They ran over a sea of shoes, they were covered in dust as buildings crumbled around them, they waded through rivers of fleeing New Yorkers in an attempt to feed a public desperate for information. News organizations around the country dispatched every available staffer to uncover any sliver of information available in the aftermath of the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history.

And the public’s appetite seemed insatiable. More than 23 million viewers tuned into cable networks and millions more tuned into the broadcast networks to watch President Bush’s speech Tuesday evening. News Web sites were jammed--hits reaching 400,000 at one time. Time, Newsweek and others published special editions.

At least 100 U.S. newspapers--from the Washington Post and New York Post to the Chicago Tribune and Detroit Free Press to the Los Angeles Times and Sacramento Bee--published “extra” editions Tuesday afternoon. Page 1 headlines boomed in oversized type: “Terror,” “Outrage,” “Day of Evil” and “Bastards!”

In New York, Harold Dow, correspondent for CBS’ “48 Hours,” fled a wall of debris and glass from the implosion of the World Trade Center’s north tower. “About 200 other people were running, but they were literally running out of their shoes,” he said. “The street was covered.” He dashed into a storefront and called in an eyewitness account.

For Rose Arce, the key was getting to the site and staying there. The CNN producer couldn’t penetrate the mob of people running away from the falling towers. She headed up the stairway of an apartment building, pounding on doors until someone who was evacuating said she could use the phone.

And so it went, hour after hour. Organizations were stretched logistically, and news gatherers were stressed emotionally as they pulled together stories of hope and despair driven by Tuesday’s terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, which killed hundreds and left thousands more presumed dead. Television news went around the clock, and morning newspapers hit the streets in the afternoon.

Suddenly there were rolling deadlines on a story that seemed to have no ending.

Broadcast anchormen like CBS’ Dan Rather, ABC’s Peter Jennings and NBC’s Tom Brokaw stayed on the air for more than 15 hours at a stretch. Continuous news coverage of the attacks’ aftermath will continue on the broadcast networks, preempting regular programming and all commercials, until at least tonight.

‘Extra! Extra!’

The Times, which last published an “extra” after O.J. Simpson’s acquittal on murder charges in 1995, printed 25,000 copies of its eight-page extra that was on the street 4 p.m. Tuesday. On Wednesday morning the paper printed 180,000 more copies than usual. Then at noon, an additional 50,000 copies were produced.

The New York Times devoted its entire 28-page main news section to the coverage--except for one back-page ad--and printed 450,000 extra copies of Wednesday’s editions, approximately doubling its normal print run for newsstand sales. Spokesmen said there would be 900,000 extra copies of today’s paper.

The Wall Street Journal’s entire staff had to evacuate its office, which is opposite the World Trade Center. Wednesday’s paper was published from suburban South Brunswick, N.J., near Princeton, in facilities owned by its parent company, Dow Jones.

Apart from the decision from executives at the major media concerns, reporters on the scene found themselves part of the stories they were trying to cover. Editorial distance became difficult.

“I was watching through the window,” Arce said, “alone in a stranger’s apartment, watching the top of the tower collapsing like an Erector set. We could see victims in the windows [of the towers] waving pieces of clothing at us. The fireball kept getting closer and closer to them, and you saw them one by one shattering the glass and jumping. . . . We could feel the shards of glass . . . chunks of the World Trade Center falling and crashing. That’s when I first started to get worried. . . .”

Half a dozen other broadcast journalists had brushes with death, and CBS News lost three technicians who were staffing the transmission centers at the World Trade Center.

The unfolding national tragedy made Internet traffic surge during work hours Tuesday when employees tend not to have access to television or radio. Some overwhelmed news sites took more than 40 seconds to load, compared to an average of about three seconds, according to San Mateo, Calif.-based Keynote Systems Inc., which monitors Web site performance.

MSNBC, the Internet’s largest news site, saw a tenfold increase in traffic, with as many as 400,000 hits at any point. CNN.com surged to 162.4 million page views in 24 hours from a 14 million average, and CNet.com’s traffic tripled on its news.com site. By Wednesday, the sites were more prepared, and congestion eased. By early afternoon, some sites reported even heavier traffic than Tuesday.

There were other issues for the weekly newsmagazines. If airplanes are still grounded, Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report will send the special reports they scrambled to assemble across the nation by truck. They had 24 hours to turn around the new editions.

People magazine’s issue--which had shark attacks on the cover--was scrapped at noon Tuesday for a 136-page special and a fold-out cover page that shows the second plane about to hit the World Trade Center. People plans to print 4 million copies and to have them on newsstands Friday.

Time, the largest of the news-weeklies, planned to post stories and photos from its special 40-page “memorial” on its Web site as it went to press Wednesday night. Time expected to publish 7 million copies for subscribers and newsstands, hoping to have most of the latter available today.

Time spokesmen said they would beam the contents of the special edition to printing sites abroad by satellite, hoping to have those magazines on international newsstands today and Friday as well.

Unlike Time, Newsweek will make its special edition available only on newsstands--and even that required significant adjustments.

“We knew we could do it journalistically because we’ve done it before,” Mark Whitaker, the editor of Newsweek, said Wednesday. The 64-page issue has no advertising and is scheduled to be printed Wednesday night, with 2 million copies to be on newsstands beginning tonight.

A Special Edition? ‘By All Means’

Brian Duffy, editor of U.S. News & World Report, said Wednesday that Mortimer Zuckerman, owner of the magazine, was in Europe when the hijacked airplanes struck, “But when I costed things out and finally hooked up with him and said I’d like to do a special issue and crash it, he said, ‘By all means.’ ”

Though it was a new team at CNN, Tuesday’s coverage echoed the cable news channel’s groundbreaking coverage of the Gulf War.

The broadcast in January 1991 drew 10.1 million viewers, a record number at the time, and an audience CNN matched on Tuesday night when Bush spoke from the Oval Office.

Whatever images remain with viewers, there is one that haunted correspondent Aaron Brown. Anchoring for CNN all day Tuesday and into the evening, Brown watched the replay of the first plane crashing into the World Trade Center’s north tower on the monitor hundreds of times.

“I’ve been doing this a long time, but I can’t shake the image,” he said. “I was afraid to close my eyes. I felt sick. I finally sat in a hotel room at about 2 a.m., and I cried. I just cried. I didn’t like being alone with this story.”

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Times staff writer Alexandra Pham contributed to this story.