By noon on September 11, 2001, the attacks and immediate fall-out had ended.

As broadcasters replayed the same stunning footage of the World Trade Center being attacked and then collapsing alongside the pictures of the Pentagon burning and a crater in Pennsylvania, people began flooding online news sites.

With the huge traffic sites many sites became unreachable and started trimming their pages of all excess ads, graphics, and HTML. (Contemporary coverage of what was happening can be found at CNET and NewBytes, among other places.)

Online-news Coverage

These screen captures were taken at the major sites I could access around between 1 p.m. and 1:30 p.m. on September 11. The pages were viewed in Mozilla and the images will all open in a new, shared window (thumbnail versions will follow, as will a more user-friendly slide show).

• CANOE [GIF size: 144KB]
• CANOE (slim-version, taken around 3:20 p.m. ET) [GIF size: 110KB]
• CNN [GIF size: 39KB]
• The Globe and Mail [GIF size: 62KB]
• Google (the search engine advising people to go to a cached page of news, taken around 3 p.m.) [GIF size: 43KB]
• MSNBC [GIF size: 80KB]
• The New York Times [GIF size: 62KB]
• Yahoo! [GIF size: 90KB]

What's notable about these is how they have stripped the down their pages, and the following stories, of all distractions. The Net, at its core, is an information medium driven by text and that is what many sites offered. The New York Times even replaced it's distinctive flag.

Many sites ran a kind of ongoing timeline, a skeletal inverted-pyramid, with new facts appearing atop the old. Readers could quickly get an overview of what happened, and easily find out what was new. CNN.com, for example, used this model for it's main story about the crash (you can see how it evolved by viewing the story as it appeared two hours later.

On September 12, CNN.com expanded on this: the day progressed the factoids were reworked into a traditional article The guts of journalism were revealed to the world.