First, it was Jim Flowers; now the granddaddy of all the blog linkers, InstaPundit, has linked to my site.

(more…)

The Poynter Institute says the TV media did a good job covering yesterday’s tragedy. I tend to agree. My dad does, too. He points out that “Dan Rather, very admirably, kept UNDERLINING and EMPHASIZING and JUST TO REITERATING many things.” Of course, Dan Rather always does that. Dan Rather probably insists on providing his doctor “context and perspective” every time he goes in to report that he’s got a cold.

I’m waiting for the Stephen F. Austin student newspaper, The Pine Log, to post its Monday morning issue online. Stephen F. Austin University is in Nacogdoches, Texas, so I wonder what kind of coverage they’ll have.

USC’s Daily Trojan, for its part, has no appreciable coverage of the shuttle tragedy. But it does have coverage of USC’s 91-76 win in men’s basketball over #22 Oregon. (I was going to go to that game, but the shuttle tragedy and all this blogging threw my weekend schedule way off. I still have tons of homework to do.) The upset victory is a rather significant development, considering the Trojans have been sucking it up big-time most of the season. Maybe there’s hope for an NIT bid yet!

If this report is accurate, it looks like the “smoking gun” in Iraq was found yesterday — but nobody was paying any attention because of the shuttle tragedy. (Thanks to InstaPundit, via Andrew, for the link.)

Obviously, this can only mean one thing: Saddam Hussein brought down the shuttle Columbia to distract attention from his own foibles! He, um, he shot a missile at it… yeah, that’s it… a really powerful, heretofore undiscovered SuperScud missile that can reach altitudes up to 100 miles high and travel at half the speed of light… and… and… and all those media reports saying that no missiles can reach higher than 95,000 feet? THEY’RE PART OF THE CONSPIRACY TOO!!!!

Somebody call Lyndon LaRouche!!!

Welcome surfers from InstaPundit, Slate, MSNBC, and Cursor! If you like these newspaper front pages, I’ve got more: from the 2002 election, the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bali bombing, the Fiesta Bowl, and the Orange Bowl. If you want more on the Columbia tragedy, click here for my lengthy Feb. 1 blog post. And while you’re here in “My world,” don’t forget to leave a comment and/or sign my guestbook. (My homepage, by the way, is here.)

For starters, by way of comparison:

The New York Times (long before they used color) from January 29, 1986: “THE SHUTTLE EXPLODES / 6 IN CREW AND HIGH-SCHOOL TEACHER ARE KILLED 74 SECONDS AFTER LIFTOFF”

The New York Times today, Febrary 2, 2003: “SHUTTLE BREAKS UP, 7 DEAD / COLUMBIA, WITH SIX AMERICAN AND ISRAELI, IS LOST OVER TEXAS AFTER STARTING DESCENT”

Here’s what the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times looked like this morning…

Yes, I notice the similarity, too. In fact, a whole lot of newspapers around the country look almost exactly like that — many with the same exact headline. Check out the Newseum and the Poynter Institute for examples.

Here, meanwhile, are some newspapers from around the country with different layouts and/or headlines:


Richmond Times-Dispatch, Richmond, VA: “SHUTTLE LOST” (with black background)

Greeley Tribune, Greeley, CO: “TEARS IN HEAVEN” (with breakup photo as background)

Unfortunately, the Daily Sentinel in Nacogdoches, Texas — the epicenter of the shuttle’s debris field — apparently doesn’t have a graphical image of its front page online. But here’s its website, complete with all sorts of local coverage. And below are the front pages of some other Texas papers:


The Dallas Morning News

Tyler Courier-Times & Telegraph

Webmaster’s note: My sources for these newspaper front pages are the Newseum, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Arlington National Cemetery. These graphics have been posted here for educational purposes only, and are not intended for any commercial or other copyright-infringing use. If you are a copyright owner of a graphic on this page and wish it to be removed, please e-mail me.

UPDATE, 6:20 PM: My website is fast approaching the 200 mark for unique hits today — 192 and counting. In addition to Columbia-related hits, I’ve gotten six search-engine hits from people looking for that “Terry Tate, Office Linebacker” Super Bowl ad.

UPDATE, 8:03 PM: Welcome, InstaBloggers! Glenn’s link to my site has pushed my traffic so high, I can’t keep up with it. So here’s a little automatic thingy that can do it for me:

users online right now
unique hits yesterday
unique hits today

Keep in mind, my previous daily record for unique hits was 135. :)

Hey, while you’re here, don’t forget to leave a comment and/or sign my guestbook. You should also definitely visit my homepage, if you haven’t yet, and also check out my extensive Feb. 1 blogging on the Columbia tragedy.

And if you like these newspaper front pages, I’ve got more of those: from the 2002 election, the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bali bombing, the Fiesta Bowl, and the Orange Bowl.

Well, I was wrong: the Times ran a huge, one-line banner headline and a large, two-line deck, thus staying consistent with the precedent it set with Challenger. This is the very rarely used “Men Walk On Moon” style. (I call it that because the moon landing was the first time the Times ever used the style. Prior to 1969, even the biggest stories had multi-line headlines with only medium-large text. V-E Day, for example, had an enormously wordy headline four lines high.)

Today’s headline: “SHUTTLE BREAKS UP, 7 DEAD.” The deck: “COLUMBIA, WITH SIX AMERICANS AND ISRAELI, IS LOST OVER TEXAS AFTER STARTING DESCENT.” Particularly poignant is the second deck: “‘Roger,’ and Then Silence.” And I like the layout twist: the long horizontal photo above the headline.

So, add this to the list of less than a dozen stories (I believe) since 1969 that the Times has deemed worthy of such a huge banner headline: among them, the moon landing (”MEN WALK ON MOON”), Nixon’s resignation (”NIXON RESIGNS”), the Challenger explosion (”THE SHUTTLE EXPLODES”), Clinton’s impeachment (”CLINTON IMPEACHED”), the Supreme Court’s ruling ending the 2000 election (”BUSH PREVAILS”), and the Sept. 11 attacks (”U.S. ATTACKED”).

More newspaper front pages coming later…

UPDATE, 7:18 AM: Jim Flowers’ Radio Weblog has linked to my Columbia coverage, the first major blogosphere link I’ve ever gotten. Unfortunately, he calls me a “UCLA student,” but I’ll forgive that mistake given the result: 74 hits to my site via his site in the last 12 hours — and these are generally the least active hours of the day. The morning and afternoon could bring a new daily hits record, perhaps by a wide margin. (Through 7:15 AM, I have a total of 78 hits today. The daily record is 135.)

UPDATE, 7:35 AM: The story about Californians spotting Columbia shedding debris over the eastern part of this state — five minutes or more before it reached Texas — seems to be gaining steam. I just saw a photo on the local station ABC 7 that backs the story up. (Haven’t found the photo online yet.)

What’s interesting is that, if this is true, the astronauts clearly weren’t aware of it, nor was mission control. But the timeline matches up quite well with the loss of sensor data on the left wing. My theory: what was seen over California was the very beginning of the so-called “zipper” effect: the first few tiles from the left wing were already getting peeled off, one by one, which then led to more and more tile loss, weakening the heat shield until finally a point of no return was reached and damage accelerated suddenly and catastrophically.

UPDATE, 12:24 PM: As it did in the aftermath of Sept. 11, The Poynter Institute, a journalism site, has posted galleries of newspaper “extra” front pages and newspaper day-after front pages. They also have a gallery of website screenshots.

You can also view today’s front pages at the Newseum. But that will only apply to the Columbia disaster for the rest of the day today; come tomorrow morning, that same link will lead you to a gallery of tomorrow’s front pages, and today’s will be erased.

I will post some front pages here shortly.

UPDATE, 12:52 PM: Thanks to the link from Jim Flowers’ Radio Weblog, my website has, as I predicted a few hours ago, broken its daily record for unique hits: 145 and counting as of 12:24 PM Pacific time. The previous record was 135, set on Dec. 17, 2002. The record-breaking 136th hit occurred at 11:39 AM, less than halfway through the day. So far, 97 of the day’s hits — almost two-thirds — have come from the Jim Flowers’ site.

In addition, I learned last night that my website actually broke the story of the shuttle tragedy to at least one person. My friend Dane said he woke up Saturday morning oblivious to the disaster, checked his e-mail and went to a couple of his favorite Apple Computer-related sites (none of which had a mention of this non-computer-related news), and then surfed by my site to see if I had updated it with any new blog posts. Lo and behold, he discovered I had; the headline was “Space shuttle lost.”

Actually, depending on when Dane looked at it, the headline he saw might have been “Space shuttle explodes.” I changed it a couple of hours after first posting it, based on the rationale that the technical details were still to sketchy know whether it truly exploded. As for alternatives, I didn’t want to use the word “destroyed” because that sounded like it was destroyed by an external force such as terrorism. And, unlike the New York Times, I didn’t want to say “breaks up,” because that just felt odd — like I was talking about Britney and Justin’s relationship or something, instead of the tragic deaths of seven heroes. But I certainly knew the shuttle was “lost,” so I decided to use that word instead.

UPDATE, 4:51 PM: I’m now up to a record-shattering 184 unique hits today, 111 of them from Jim Flowers’ Radio Weblog (which has now corrected his mistaken statement that I am a UCLA student) and six from Jay Manifold’s A Voyage to Arcturus, which recommends me as one of two sites in the whole blogosphere to check out for “comprehensive coverage” (the other being Flowers’ site). Thanks, Jay!

Manifold also notes, however, that my site “takes a while to load,” so I’ll have to take a look and see if I can cut down on some extraneous homepage content. :)

Google has yet to re-index my site; when it does, I presume I’ll start getting at least a trickle, if not a flood, of additional hits resulting from Google searches for terms related to the shuttle disaster. In particular, if I am re-indexed in the next 12 hours or so, I expect a bunch of Google hits tomorrow, when people return to work and start using their high-speed office computers to search for news-related terms. (This happens whenever a major news story breaks over the weekend.)

I’m going to stop this post now, and start a new one above. Forgive me if all this posting about my web traffic seems self-indulgent at such a time of tragedy, but I can’t help myself; I’ve always been obsessed with my website’s traffic flow.

I’m at Honors House with friends Dane & Megan, watching Saturday Night Live rerun with Al Gore. Missed it the first time. It’s great!

We just got back from the Southern California quarterfinal of the International Championship of College A Capella (ICCA) at Bovard Auditorium on campus. The SoCal VoCals won! Hooray!

I am very anxious to see what the morning’s New York Times front page will look like. Will they do a typical NYT banner headline — two or three lines high, filled with multiple phrases and semicolons, printed in a medium-large font — or will they use the exceptionally rare one-line banner headline — printed in a font so huge that only a few words can fit on the line — followed by a two-line banner sub-headline (or deck)? The latter is what I call the “Men Walk On Moon” style, since the Apollo 11 coverage was the first time the Times ever used it; it was also used on Sept. 12, 2002 (”U.S. Attacked”), but has been used no more than a dozen times in Times history, I believe. (”Nixon Resigns” is another example.)

If the Times wants to be consistent with its 1986 decision to use a giant headline for the Challenger disaster (”The Shuttle Explodes”) it will use the huge headline style again this morning. But I suspect this will not be the case. I look for a very long, three-line headline, something to the effect of, “THE SHUTTLE COLUMBIA IS DESTROYED ON RE-ENTRY, KILLING ALL SEVEN ABOARD; NASA SAYS CAUSE OF DISASTER UNKNOWN.”