• by Masha Geller , June 7, 2002

On September 12th, most of America woke up desperately hoping the previous day’s events were just a bad dream. They weren’t. The images we saw and the sounds we heard were real, and that reality will forever haunt our memories. Now we must raise a flag, just like those three firefighters did in the rubble of the World Trade Center, and try to move on. It will be hard. The media will continue to be full of terror coverage for quite some time, and no matter how hard we try we will never be able to fully recover from the images.

If there is a bright side to anything that happened on September 11th—and I’m not sure this qualifies in the grand scheme of things—it’s that all Internet proponents were served with a big helping of reality. And that reality is that the web—fabulous as it is—still needs a lot of work. Yes, everyone praised email and instant messenger for connecting people on the day the phones went silent. And the praise is well-deserved. But thinking back on September 11th, I realize that connecting people (which is no small task) was the web’s one and only accomplishment. When it came to providing its users with information, the Internet failed miserably.

As I was driving to work that Tuesday morning, a DJ on an FM station I was listening to broke in with a special report about a plane crashing into one of the twin towers. I switched to AM and quickly found out about the second plane and heard President Bush say the dreaded word—”terrorists”—live on the air. Running into the office a few minutes later, I quickly tried to log on to CNN, MSNBC, and FOX News websites, but they were useless even with a broadband connection.

Everyone in our office was also trying to connect to news sites and everyone quickly gave up. And we’re an office of Internet Believers, used to getting most of our news online on any given day—be it via news sites, streaming video, or audio. So what did the tech-savvy MediaPost staff do? We crowded into the office of the president of the company, who happened to have an ancient wooden radio on his bookshelf, and breathlessly listened, staring in disbelief at the faded brown grid of the Sony speaker as WCBS anchors described one unthinkable event after another.

And we weren’t alone. A few days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Pew Internet and American Life Project released some data showing that more than 30 million people sought news online that Tuesday, which is one-third greater than the news-seeking population on a typical day. And about 43 percent of them said they had problems getting to the sites they wanted to access. Of those who had trouble, 41 percent kept trying to get to the same site until they finally reached it; 38 percent went to other sites; 19 percent gave up their search.

We were in the last group. We gave up and followed the whole story the same way our parents and grandparents followed the story in December of 1941—on the radio. The web failed us, its biggest proponents.

September 11, 2001, saw an unprecedented catastrophe. We will never understand why it happened or “feel better” about any of it. But we do have to rebuild our country, and one of the items on the list should be building a web that will not only help people find their loved ones when phones don’t work, but a web that lives up to its original promise of providing round-the-clock information to all who want it.

Masha Geller is Editor-in-Chief of MediaPost.