New York Times and Wall Street Journal reacted differently
I’m one of those people who still care about print journalism, partly because Network World still has a print edition, partly because I spent the first half of my career at a local daily newspaper, and partly because I believe that print remains important.
So it was with great interest that I read this story about how The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal reacted to the news late Sunday evening that U.S. forces had killed Osama bin Laden. The news broke while both papers were printing their Monday editions.
As one would expect, The Times stopped the presses, ditched those papers that had already been printed, and provided all of its print readers with the full story.
The Journal did not, opting instead to deliver two editions of the paper that were totally devoid of any mention of what was immediately obvious to be among the biggest – if not the biggest – news stories in a decade.
I haven’t seen any explanation from Journal executives and cannot imagine what it would be. I did find this blog post from a Journal subscriber who complained to the paper about the error in judgment. (The subscriber happens to be a journalism student. Enough said.)
The Journal’s decision does leave one to wonder what story it might take to get someone there to shout “stop the presses.”
I recently wrote about the single instance in my newspaper career where I was called upon to yell those three iconic words. If you’re interested, it was on Jan. 28, 1986.
(Update: The above-mentioned journalism student, Tori Stilwell, notes that The New York Times wasn’t any more successful than the Journal at providing print readers with the big news in North Carolina. She writes: “The New York Times also continued delivery of some of its non-OBL papers. Chapel Hill/Raleigh and I’m assuming most of NC did not receive any copies that had OBL on the front page on Monday morning. Subscribers didn’t get them, and the local coffee shops didn’t have them either.”)
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