From the professionals: Newsday

Newspaper Research Journal, Winter 2003 by Martin, Alex

At a meeting on the afternoon of Sept. 11, Newsday editors decided that "The Lost" would be a centerpiece of the paper's coverage of the attack on the World Trade Center and its aftermath. It began running on Sept. 13-two days before any similar effort that we know of-and ran nine tabloid pages. It evolved into a standard feature of our coverage, averaging more than three pages a day until the end of December. The paper continued running two pages each weekday until March 15, 2002, by which time more than 1,300 profiles had been published, and then dropped back to two pages a week.

We made this commitment because we felt it was important to humanize the disaster, and because one of Newsday's core beliefs is that newspapers owe those caught in tragedies, whether a plane crash or the carnage of Sept. 11, more than the anonymity of victimhood. In fact, we had done something similar after the crash of TWA Flight 800 in 1996, and we knew from that experience that tracking down the families and friends of the dead and missing would be a difficult challenge. So we pulled together a group of some of our most experienced and dogged reporters-most of them members of the investigations and database-reporting teams-to begin the work. Eventually, after more and m ore of the victims became known, we mobilized reporters from every part of the paper to produce nuanced stories of the lives the dead had lived.

While we wanted to profile as many victims as we could, we focused much of our energy on the Long Island victims because we knew that for our readers these were the stories that resonated most strongly. They were our neighbors, our friends and our family members. "The Lost" became, we hope, a way to bring the Island together in our mourning.

These were stories that were more personal than standard obituaries, yet went beyond mere anecdotes. Unrestrained by a rigid format, they were rounded profiles of 250 to 500 words, many of them vivid and filled with a sense of truth, as in this excerpt by staff writer Nedra Rhone:

Years ago, when the redheaded firebrand would walk into a room, a buzz would course through the crowd. "Oh, Lord, what's going to happen tonight?" they would say. Sometimes drinks were thrown, sometimes egos were bruised and sometimes there were tears, but Betty Farmer always gave a great show.

Her voice had good pitch, her looks were easy on the eye and her style, in song and in life, was vinegar-spiked matter-of-fact. "She was a very complex and diverse woman," said her daughter, Kathryn Nesbit of St. Simons Island, Ga. "She would never win the mother of the year award, but as a human being, she was right up there in the top 10 percent."

"The Lost" resonated strongly with our readers, who found the pages both engaging and hauntingly compelling, and also with many Americans who had never before read Newsday, but who were drawn to our Web site.

Thank God that you are publishing all the names and photos of all of the people who were killed on September 11, one reader e-mailed. ... Now when I see the video of the planes hitting the towers, I see the faces, names and the lives of all these people.

"Remembering the Lost," newsday.com's online database, had by March 2002 more than 3,000 names, more than 2,000 profiles from Newsday and other Tribune Co. newspapers, as well as 1,400 family photographs. Launched a week after the attacks, it averaged half a million page views a week in its first two weeks. Long Island's United Way and the Suffolk County Police Department have both used the database to assess the impact in their areas. Church groups across the country have taken names from the list to read at services. Workers at a naval base in Washington State used it to create ornaments with each name to hang on the base Christmas tree.

"I'm sure it wasn't easy," another reader wrote, "but it was necessary. Their faces, indelible in my mind, will help me remember . . . ."

For the Newsday journalists who compiled, wrote, illustrated and designed the database and "The Lost," it was more than our job. It was a commitment to our neighbors - one we plan on keeping long after contest deadlines fade, until every family who wants a story about a relative gets one.

"The lost and the missing are chasing us now as we drive to work or put on our clean clothes and shiny shoes," staff writer Stephanie McCrummen wrote in an essay introducing the profiles one day. "They are chasing us in words and story after story on page after page after page, and they are catching up to us all."

Martin, Newsday's assistant managing editor for Long Island, oversees news coverage on Long Island. He was part of the team that won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news for coverage of the crash of TWA Flight 800. Martin earned a bachelor's degree in journalism from Louisiana State University.