May 1, 10:50 PM ESTThe first lede package on NYTimes.com featuring Bin Laden’s death.“It seemed obvious to me, given the late hour, that as important and historic as our front page would be, the main platform for our coverage would be our Web site.”
My column this week looks at the extraordinary efforts of Times staffers as they responded to the news of Osama Bin Laden’s death in a raid by Navy Seals. Because the news broke late on print deadlines, The Times took extraordinary measures to stop the presses, remake print pages and rush to get updated copies not only to New York readers but to many readers in major cities nationwide. On top of that, the Times mounted an intense global reporting effort aimed at delivering fresh stories through the night for publication on NYTimes.com, which became the key venue for breaking developments after the print edition closed at 12:45 a.m. Monday. The result was an outpouring of fresh copy that was published online-only and then superseded eventually by new stories on Monday, some of which ultimately fed a 10-page special print section titled “The Death of Bin Laden” that was delivered Tuesday.
Since my print column does not have additional space for displaying graphics, I’ve included some images below to show how this transformation occurred.
The Print Edition
Rebooking the space in the front section of The New York Times on short notice is no easy task. But that’s just what deputy director of news design Brian Fidelman was asked to do late into Sunday evening. Mr. Fidelman returned to the office around 10:30 to help reallocate space to fit the additional news into the section without the addition of any extra pages.
Moving all of the original stories off of A1 to make room for the four new Bin Laden stories, the news designers found space in the front section and in Business to hold the original stories. This was accomplished by removing ads, and in the case of Elisabeth Rosenthal’s story on Tilapia farming, shrinking the main photo that accompanied the article:
NYTimes.com
May 1, 11:49 PM ESTRelated Column
The Times on Osama
The Times races to cover the late breaking news of the killing of Osama Bin Laden.
“It seemed obvious to me, given the late hour, that as important and historic as our front page would be, the main platform for our coverage would be our Web site,” managing editor Jill Abramson told me by e-mail. “I imagined that many people would get little sleep this night and would spend the pre-dawn hours wanting to find great information that would help explain what had happened.”
Into the wee hours of Monday morning, The Times newsroom staff was thinking about a new way to present this breaking news. “We decided that we needed to move to an even bigger presentation, given the importance of the news,” Jonathan Ellis, assistant editor for digital platforms told my assistant Joseph Burgess. “We do have several different home page “templates,” which allow us to lay out our big news packages in different ways — smaller photos, bigger photos, banner headlines, no banner headlines, etc. However, we determined that none of our available home page templates provided the emphasis this story deserved. Thus, we made the decision to go to a customized layout, outside of what our templates are designed for.”
May 2, 12:49 AM EST“This customized layout [seen above] would make the Bin Laden package even wider on the page than usual, expanding into the area usually occupied by Opinion content and pushing the Opinion content over into the area usually occupied by our Facebook module.
“A few weeks before, one of our home page producers, Ariane Bernard, had presciently been working on such a customized layout just in case a huge news story were to occur. But since this was not a standard template, this customized layout required a lot of work with the page’s HTML code, and all of the kinks were not worked out — we were unable to roll out the bigger layout as soon as we would have liked. Fortunately, a number of producers and editors, including Hamilton Boardman, Seth Carlson and Nathan Ashby-Kuhlman, either rushed into the office or worked from home on this.”
And it was this level of dedication, from the editors, reporters and producers working from the newsroom and their homes in New York, coupled with the efforts of Times staffers working from Washington and around the globe, that made this a special and memorable night for The Times.
