The National September 11 Memorial Museum Opens

On May 15, 2014 the National September 11 Memorial Museum opened at Ground Zero in New York City. One day earlier The New York Times published a review of the museum by Holland Cotter entitled "The 9/11 Story Told at Bedrock, Powerful as a Punch to the Gut. Sept. 11 Memorial Museum at Ground Zero Prepares for Opening."

From the standpoint of media history, I found the interactive feature, also published in The New York Times on May 14, an example of how news coverage had been changed by the Internet. The feature by Leslye Davis, Alicia Desantis, Graham Roberts and Matt Ruby was entitled, "A New Story Told at Grand Zero. The National September 11 Memorial Museum." In a magazine format the feature took you from the surface down underground and through the new museum. As you read the narrative and viewed the striking images, you passed narrated videos which automatically turned and allowed designers of the museum to explain the purposes and design of different features of the museum in their own words. It was a remarkably effective introduction to a museum recording the September 11 2001 events which, unfolded— it was estimated— before two billion people, on television, and for which the repercussions continued to be felt world wide more than a decade later.

Prior to the Internet The New York Times would have covered the story in print with more text and captioned still images. Statements by designers of the museum would have been quoted. In "A New Story Told at Ground Zero" the museum designers were given the opportunity to tell the story in their own words and in the individual sound of their own voice.

Also on May 14, 2014 The New York Times published "9/11 Artifacts and the Stories They Tell" by Stephen Farrell, which consisted of five narrated videos. Of special interest to me was the first video, The Keepers of 9/11, in which the chief curator of the September 11 Memorial Museum and officials at other New York institutions described how they selected the objects "by which future generations will remember September 11."