Mike Smartt
New media editor-in-chief of BBC News
People appear to be increasingly turning to the Web for their breaking news. It's the biggest story since the second World War. We decided to clear everything off the front page, which we've never done before and concentrate all our journalists on the story.
We work hand in hand with the broadcast teams but don't wait for them to report the facts. It works both ways.
By Wednesday morning, we had 7,000 e-mails, many of them extremely powerful and moving, that we were able to share with the Today programme and television news.
Most important to us were the audio and video elements. It was among the most dramatic news footage anyone has ever seen. The ability to put all that on the Web for people to watch over again sets us apart.
Steve Bennedik
Editor of Sky News Interactive
I was talking to a colleague about some graphics when I saw the first tower in flames. I immediately dashed back to my work area and like everyone else, we threw all our people and resources at it.
We haven't got a massive online team but we punch above our weight. The thing that will stay in people's minds is not the reams of words but the pictures. So it was important to get them on the site and on the Sky Active service as soon as possible.
We got all four video streams dedicated to the story, with a live feed from Fox News to give the US perspective.
It was a real achievement from a Sky News point of view; we truly dealt with the story across online, the rolling news channel and the interactive service. It reinforces the message that we're the number one channel for breaking news stories.
I'm hoping that people who logged on for the first time will return now to the online service and Sky Active.
This shows the power of the medium from a journalistic point of view. We had a staggering number of e-mails and we put as many as we could on the site.
People just wanted some means of expressing how sad and sickened they were".
Nick Wrenn
Editor of CNN.com Europe
I was with our CNN Asia colleagues last week - it was the evening and I'd just stepped into the foreign correspondents' club. Everyone was peering up at a TV screen, open-mouthed in silence. The image of thick smoke carpeting the top of the World Trade Centre was staggering.
I phoned our duty editor in London - the office there was already in overdrive. A minute later, we all saw the second plane fly into the building. Me and my Hong Kong counterpart, John Beeston, jumped straight into a taxi and back to the Hong Kong office.
The Internet has to be instant, get the top line out immediately, then constantly update.
At CNN, we had three news rooms across the world working together - Atlanta, London and Hong Kong - so we came at the story from all angles. We were in constant communication with each other, on the phone and on instant messenger.
Like all the other major news providers, we fell over for a while. CNN.com had ramped up its servers ahead of the US election but it wasn't enough.
The site was temporarily stripped back to a low-graphic story so we could give people the latest headlines.
Technical staff in Atlanta, London and Hong Kong then worked round the clock to beef up the servers and enable CNN to support three editions of its website around the world.
To be honest, it showed that the Web is not quite up to the job yet. It couldn't meet the demand and millions of viewers would've gone from the web to TV for updates. What the web can do is shout about a story as soon as it happens, then offer a huge multimedia resource for people to explore.
Aside from presenting news, the Internet is a great tool for people to communicate through e-mail, instant messengers and web pages, especially when phone lines are jammed.
It's a day and a week that I'll never forget, that's for sure. Fortunately, I don't know anyone in New York who is not accounted for, although some of my colleagues do.
I've stood on the top of the twin towers and like many I can't begin to imagine the horror of what happened.
Daniel Jones
Head of content, Ananova.com
We realised the scale of the story almost immediately. The attack provoked the biggest single surge in traffic we've had in the six years we've been going.
Traffic actually increased on the Wednesday following the attack. I get the feeling that on Tuesday everyone was glued to their TV sets, whereas by Wednesday people were turning to the Internet for more depth and to follow different strands of the story.
Every aspect of our operation is geared up to sourcing and delivering real time content and along with the web stories we were also pushing out e-mail and SMS alerts and updating our Wap site. We take pride in our technical operation being as geared up to cope with something like this as the content side.
The web is also much more interactive than TV and complements it well. Our readers were a prime source of information. We've got a big following in the US thanks to our virtual newscaster and we were getting eyewitness accounts and digital photographs within minutes.
There isn't a single person who isn't touched by a story like this.
Philippa Edward
Commercial director, of ITN New Media (UK)
We're still trying to digest the scale of it. The flood of news coming in made it a real challenge to keep up. What was originally a plane hitting the World Trade Centre soon developed into something completely different.
It was a real hands-on job, with everybody pitching in to keep the site and our syndicated feeds up to date. The ethos of ITN across all platforms is to get as much multimedia out as possible and co-operate to best use our resources. The interactive elements, audio and video were extremely popular. More than 30 per cent of our traffic comes from the US, and people were sidestepping US sites to come to us.
There was an unusual feeling of cooperation between broadcasters and sites; everyone was united in getting the news out and giving people as much information as possible.
Our site toppled over briefly on Tuesday afternoon, when we got a 450 per cent increase in traffic. We also had a massive response from users and had to open new e-mail file servers and divert resources to deal with the deluge. Many of the e-mails we received overnight were from the States, and, as you can imagine, were particularly heartrending.