Front pages were scrapped and called back under speculation that the news would be a major story. Five stories were struck from the Washington Post and six new stories had to be written.
At the Post, the final edition did not close until after 2 a.m. — hours after the normal deadline. It also printed an extra 69,200 copies of the paper to meet the demand of readers hoping to buy a memento of the day.
Indeed, the news was huge: Osama bin Laden was dead.
People were also so eager to see the front pages, the website for the Newseum, which collects over a hundred front pages from around the world, crashed. Paul Sparrow, senior vice president at the Newseum, told the Associated Press the site was processing more than 2,800 transactions per second when it crashed. Here are a few of the images from the Newseum’s collection:
