Becoming a Journalist in the Time of 9/11
‘Everything about journalism changes now,’ my professors said.
Fearless reporting, a behind-the-curtains look at how journalism is made — and an unabashed point of view. Welcome to Chills.
I found my seat around an oblong table in a small room on an upper floor of Columbia University’s Journalism School. It was May 2001, and I was just beginning my degree and, hopefully, my exciting new career as a journalist.
As I sat, I noted piles — and piles — of paper at one end of the long table. Soon to be perched in front of these precarious towers was a professor who pilled bits of those papers into tiny balls and ate them.
Don’t let her absolute quirkiness fool you: I learned everything the school could teach me pretty much in that first semester with that excellent professor. (Minus the horrifying advice from an older male professor that if we want to make a living in journalism, we would have to write a book that becomes a movie, or marry rich. Unfortunately, I know now that he was right.) I was in the part-time journalism program, working full-time, and our Reporting/Writing I class would meet for something like eight hours on a Saturday. We also had an assistant professor, who was a hard-assed New York Times editor (two decades later, she would become my hard-assed New York Times editor).
The first assignment for that class was humiliating. We’d gone to see then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani at some kind of press conference, and I happened to notice something very personal about him that I realized might be a scoop. I worked the story and realized it wasn’t. So instead, I wrote a witty, wry “Talk of the Town” New Yorker-style piece. Or so I thought. What I’d written, according to my professor, was a pretentious piece of garbage.
“Who is your audience?” she practically yelled at me in her soft voice. “This is elitist nonsense!” (Or something like that.) Our audience, as more than one journalism professor would come to tell us, was the little old woman in Kansas flipping through her newspaper. (More on the wisdom and fallacy of that another time.)
I don’t blame my professor. I was born and raised in New York and had not yet learned that this does not make us more clever than mostly everyone else in the country. You can, however, rest assured that I learned this lesson that day — and I have never, not once, forgotten it since.
In one of our first all-school lectures, then-professor Sree Srinivasan gave us a talk about this newish thing called “the internet.” (Capital “I” at the time.) I’d come from a small undergraduate university where, a few years before, we’d had a computer center within our science center. We could get — slowly — on Netscape and used a campus-wide email system called Pine. As we students made the shift from voicemails and in-person stalking of one another, we reached a new level of obsession in communicating with our friends, our crushes. Now we had voicemails, in-person stalking and email.
As he spoke, Professor Srinivasan asked questions. One of his first was: “So, say you have a question, and you want to look on the Internet to find the answer. Where do you start?”
Mesmerized that nobody was answering, my hand went up and was called on. “Um, Google,” I said.
“Aha! Yes!” Srinivasan said. “Who here knows what Google is?”
Yes, he said that.
Now before you roll your eyes, remember that this was the summer of 2001, although I personally found it uniquely worthy of an eye roll. The internet had been around for years, but Google had only come into existence at the end of 1998. In September 2001, only a little more than half of Americans were accessing the internet at all (and we’re mainly talking bzzzzp-brrrrrp-mrrrrrrahhhhhblzzzzz dial-up), according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. Still, that was a shocking increase over the previous year.
The next few months passed between school and work until that terrible morning of September 11. I had class on the 13th, but went down to the pile that morning to record everything I could. It was awkward because I wasn’t writing for a particular outlet (my full-time job was as the copy chief of the now-deceased Architecture magazine), but the budding journalist in me felt compelled to write everything down and take a billion photographs. As 4 p.m. approached, I knew I had to make a decision: stay put or head uptown to class. As I agonized over this, I spotted one of the first guests we’d had in my RWI class: New York Times reporter Al Baker.
I posed my problem to him. Do I stay or do I go?
“You’re doing everything right,” he told me. “But you need to get to class. We need you, the next generation of journalists.”
I hightailed it past smashed cop cars and useless lines of bulldozers and sped uptown on the 2/3.
That evening, the professors at Columbia were as visibly stunned and upset as we students, but part of that was because, as many of them said, “Everything about journalism changes now.”
I wasn’t sure what they meant, but I knew that being attacked on our home soil had something to do with it.
As the months dragged by with the burn cloud of Ground Zero ever visible out my Brooklyn window, I realized that the so-called change also had something to do with the fact that online newspapers were the new way to keep up to date. (Granted, I didn’t have a television.) September 11 certainly prompted online outlets to ramp up their content. News was coming hard and fast as the entire country was suffering a kind of frozen fear. Or at least those of us in New York City certainly were. Processing what we were going through became urgent, and constant news and think pieces multiplied.
All these years, I’ve occasionally wondered about that pronouncement by my professors. What did they mean about journalism changing as of that moment?
I’ve had 22 years to consider it, and I still don’t quite have the answer. But I can tell you that my career followed the trajectory of booms and busts of media outlets, with the busts ever more frequent than not. It is strange to consider all these years on that instead of placing a greater value on our press in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Americans have chosen a path that has led to where we are today, where too many people mainly loathe us. (To that I say, media is not a monolith. Anyway.)
The world changed on 9/11. But I’m still puzzling over how journalism did. I’d love to hear your thoughts. Also, I’m happy to answer any questions that you may have after reading this — about J-school, reporting on 9/11, the nightmarish downfall of the media industry or even the sexism of male journalists like the one who made that comment about “marrying rich” to a room full of mainly women. Ask away, and thank you, as always, for reading.
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I began my career at the age of 17 in 1956. The assignment was to cover a rugby match involving Saracens & Wasps in London and my new boss at Hayter's Agency sent it over to be published in The Times. Working 7 days a week, loving every minute, I never looked back. I know full well how totally different life is now but it does not not change my opinion of the best way to become a journalist. Get out and do it.
Lauren, if you would like to read more about how one young man became a journalist, my autobiography The Roving Eye - A Reporter's Love Affair with Paris, Politics & Sport goes through the detail of my next job - joining the London Evening Standard whose brilliant editor was Charles Wintour, Anna's father.