A newsroom on 9/11
I know everyone's got to be sick of 9/11 and everything associated with it, so I'll make this short.
I remember the morning of 9/11 as well as anybody else, getting woken up by a phone call from a good friend at 6 a.m., then rushing down to the Times-Standard newsroom and turning on CNN. Usually everyone came in when they came in and went about whatever story they were doing. But that day we all had the same story. We spent the day, and into the night, in a fog, on the phone with the airport manager and sheriff's department and coast guard, all of which were engaged in monitoring the airport and coastline for any further attacks. I even remember making an obligatory trip to the Board of Supervisors' meeting, Third District Supervisor John Wooley calling the attacks 'horrific,' the other supes also grim and solem, receiving updates on the local situation. It was clear everyone's minds were anywhere but on the agenda.
If you readers have a copy of the T-S, Sept. 12, 2001, keep it. Go back through it, even the Sports pages. You'll notice EVERY SINGLE STORY in that edition is devoted to the attacks. Every story. I haven't been in the news business that long, just a few years, but I doubt that's ever happened before, or if so, not very often. So keep it, it's a collector's edition.
Looking back, it may strike some readers as funny -- all of this to-do when in fact we were, as usual, the Lost Coast, Behind the Redwood Curtain, worlds away from the disaster, from the columns of dust and smoke and screams arising and expiring from Ground Zero. We North Coast media were just like the rest of the world -- glued to the TV. But you could say the same for just about everyone, everywhere -- we became, for a horrible, long day, and days after, a generation of witnesses, bystanders, and yet, in a way, casualties as well.
In retrospect it's easy to seem like overreaction, melodrama. But it didn't feel that way then.
Here in Europe, I have many friends and acquaintances who also remember the day. One student, Marketa, said she was at work when she got a call from her son. 'Turn on the TV!' he told her, and for the rest of the afternoon all of her colleagues were sitting around the TV. Another friend, Karel, said he got a call from his mother, and at first he thought she was joking. My Irish friends, Dave and Orla, were on a trip in North Africa at the time. They were in an Internet cafe checking email and saw the news. At first, they thought it was a hoax, some hackers who'd managed to break onto Yahoo news. Then they checked a bunch of other sites and found out it wasn't just hackers.
As far as the newsroom on 9/11: how much it's changed since then. Managing Editor Connie Rux and her husband, Sports writer Jack Rux, have long since moved on. City Editor Cliff Larimer ('Get your head out of your ass, Faulk!' Tressler, get off your ass and get over to that courthouse!' Driscoll! What's with the bird lede?') has long since retired with his wife Betsy. Long-time reporter David Anderson, who had only a few months more to live, ambling in with his usual massive ease, and yet even he did a double take when we broke the news (he'd been asleep, he was already suffering from illness). The photo and editing and layout desks, working long into the night.
One last thing: I suppose on this day we should also remember the dangers of insularism. How often do we mark the anniversary of the victims of the 2005 tsunami in Indonesia, which killed far, far more people than the terrorist attack on 9/11? Or the victims of terrorist attacks in Spain or even London for that matter? I could go on and on, listing the world's atrocities, which occurred long before 9/11 and will continue to occur long after. That's not intended to be cynical. It's just a dead certainty.
I could say it keeps us journalists working. Now THAT would be cynical.