The front page: How newspapers portrayed the Vegas massacre

A cowboy hat abandoned on the pavement. A boot. A sneaker.

A woman in denim shorts lying on her side, injured — or possibly dead — with blood streaking her bare legs. A man shielding with his body a woman lying on the ground. People sobbing in one another’s arms.

The glass-walled tower of the Mandalay Bay hotel, with the two ominously shattered windows from which the gunman fired.

“Carnage.” “Massacre.” “Horror.”

The era is long past when people get news from newspapers. The Las Vegas shooting took place late on a Sunday evening, too late for most of the Monday morning papers, at least in the eastern half of the country. And yet at a time of national tragedy the front pages of America’s, and indeed the world’s, dailies still serve an important civic function, ratifying our sense of what matters, distilling tragedy to a few iconic images or words. Precisely because they lack the infinite bandwidth of the Internet, their choice of what to show and say still matters in helping us think about the unthinkable. (Jerry Adler/Yahoo News)

Read more from Yahoo News:

– A surreal scene as Las Vegas returns to business after Sunday massacre
– Portrait of a mass killer: The details don’t add up
– Las Vegas, a ‘soft target,’ long feared an attack
– Now I Get It: Why haven’t authorities named Las Vegas gunman a terrorist?
– Photos: Scenes from the Las Vegas mass shooting
– Photos: Makeshift memorials pay tribute to Las Vegas shooting victims

_____

See more news-related photo galleries and follow us on Yahoo News Photo Twitter and Tumblr.