How Today’s Front Pages Showed Boston’s Manhunt

As they did following Monday’s bombing, the nation’s newspapers, unsurprisingly, devoted their front pages to Boston this morning. Print newspapers have the awkward problem of coming out just once a day, and as they were sent to press before the drama really got going in the early hours of Friday morning, most of them had no occasion to show the fear and violence, fast-forwarding instead to headlines and photos showing the triumphant celebrations that broke out when law enforcement finally arrested the suspect that eluded them through the day.

Mayor Tom Menino’s tweet in the minutes following the arrest—”We got him”—seems to have inspired the most headline writers (including our own.) Here’s just a fraction of those that ran with that headline:

Here’s the Tampa Bay Times:

The Chicago Sun Times:

And the New York Daily News:

“The Hunt Is Over” was another popular headline. Here are a couple:

The Chicago Tribune

The Washington Post:

As they often do, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal went for textier, newsier headlines that tried to encompass much of the news.

Times:

The Journal:

The New York Post had the awkward task of displaying the faces of the actual suspects just a couple days after their front page seemed to imply (quite wrongly) that a different local high school kid was a likely suspect:

The Post’s Soul Sister, the Boston Herald stayed in character with a fist-pump of a headline as well:

What to think of all these joyous photo images and covers? It struck us as capturing only the tail end of the bizarre emotions Boston felt throughout the very long day Friday. We think a couple papers did a better job getting at the exhausting, terrifying day that more closely resembles the one experienced by a cooped up city.

The Arizona Republic’s “Boston Exhales” managed to combine the feeling of relief with the sense that we’d been holding our breaths for the better part of 24 hours.

And the Boston Globe, which did many things well yesterday, had one of the better lines with “Nightmare’s End.”

A nightmare ends, indeed. We may have the conceit that we’re the “Hub”, but for now, may we hope Boston never needs to display such enormous top-of-the-fold headlines on the front pages of the nation and the world for a while … maybe not until the World Series or something.

All front pages care of the Newseum’s gallery of front pages.