The New York Times taxed traditional reporting tools to the limit shortly after the first plane slammed into the World Trade Center.

Within 24 hours, more than 600 files of story notes accumulated in the newsroom's Atex computer system metro queue. There were more related files in the foreign, national and business queues. Searching for any snippet of information became increasingly difficult and slow as torrents of information poured in.

Some reporters tried other means of organization. One started a spreadsheet to track suspects that soon grew to monstrous proportions. The spreadsheet was difficult to read and almost impossible to print. Attempts to share the spreadsheet over the network compounded the unwieldiness.

A terrorism team was assembled and editors had trouble tracking more than 80 reporters and their assignments, phone numbers and e-mail addresses.

I didn't know it at the time, but I had an intranet ready for a story of the magnitude of Sept. 11.

Managing the information

A web application to search the accumulating notes was ready the next morning.

A virtual online newsroom began to take shape by the second afternoon, with applications that allowed lightning-fast searches of accumulated notes, suspects, reporters, phone numbers – anything that involved Sept. 11. Reporters and editors could add or update information whenever they wanted, from wherever they wanted.

The intranet within an intranet wasn't always the perfect tool – no such tool exists for what had happened — but it did help significantly in managing information.

In all, about 20 pages were created to deal with the coverage. But with the exception of one of those 20 pages, I either already had similar pages that could be modified to suit the task or had a program ready to write the code needed.

Every "borrowed" Web page needed tinkering – some needed extensive rewrites – but anything I had on hand was better than starting from scratch. And what I had on hand was a virtual newsroom waiting for a project.

Many of the pages were written for coverage of the 2000 national party conventions, where they were never used. The Sept. 11 pages were better received than the convention pages. In the first two months, the newsroom was calling up those related pages between 2,200 and 2,600 times a day.

Pages for preparation

Rather than enumerate which pages the Times used for Sept. 11 coverage, let's concentrate on pages that you should have ready for the next breaking story or project, be it big or small. To start, you want to prepare four pages to display information:

1. A news-brief or announcements page on which information important to the project can be posted.

2. A whereabouts page that will allow anyone involved in the project to find reporters, editors and assignments quickly.

3. A text-search page to search collected text or HTML documents related to the project.

4. An events page to track events related the project, such as press conferences or meetings.

Before you create a monster, ask yourself some questions about these pages.

Who will keep them current? Who can add breaking information? Who can delete information? Who can edit embarrassing typos? If all answers point to you, you're heading for trouble before you start.

Take a look around the newsroom. A good look. Is there anyone who can edit a Web page while you're sleeping, on vacation or on deadline? Probably not.

As important as you are to your newsroom's computer-assisted reporting efforts, you are not indispensable. In fact, you will become a bottleneck if your intranet cannot be brought up to date without you. Talented writers and news gatherers surround you. Why not marshal their talents to help? Probably all but two people in your newsroom can type into a Web input box. (The other two can't do anything with computers. Accept that and get on with life.)

To bring more hands into the process, try following a few guidelines that will help keep your intranet current:

• Guideline 1. Do not post anything on your intranet unless there is some mechanism (or persons in addition to yourself) in place to keep the information current.

• Guideline 2. Whenever possible, construct information pages so they are fully and easily editable by any persons you choose at anytime they choose.

We're taking it as a given that no one else in your newsroom knows HTML, so we've got to add a few more guidelines to make 1 and 2 practical:

• Guideline 3. Use databases to drive virtually all of your content that is not archived text.

• Guideline 4. Use interactive templates to display the contents of the databases.

With these guidelines in mind, you'll need one more page in your basic package to allow selected users to upload new text files for your text search page. You'll also need at least three more pages to make the announcements, whereabouts and events pages fully editable on the Web. The interactive templates for the latter tasks are complicated, tedious to build and difficult to debug. In that light, consider another guideline:

• Guideline 5. Use one or more programs to create the code to