Battleships Restored

Last week, The New York Times posted digital versions of censored - and therefore unpublished - articles written in 1942 to commemorate the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. The 15,000-word series, written in 1942 by Times reporter Robert Trumbull, detailed the Herculean engineering feat of raising and repairing four heavily damaged battleships. Sixty-four years later, the series is available now, in its entirety, online.

What's shocking is that the six news stories were "impounded" by the Dept. of the Navy for the bizarre justification that Trumbull's "exclusive" was unfair to other correspondents who wanted the same story, reports MediaPost. 

Andrew Rosenthal, associate editor of the Times editorial section, where the feature appeared, remarked: "This is the wonderful thing about the internet. You can do unlimited publishing at almost no cost. These are great articles, obviously significant historically, but there's no way we can publish a 15,000-word series in the print edition."

The Times's digital publication of the original articles as PDFs took advantage of the power of the Web to massively expand on the paper's print edition, which published excerpts and an explanatory article by Lawrence Downes, the project's mastermind.