Breaking the News

“Go downstairs and get a quote from the governor’s press office. We need her response so we can run an extra at 11:45,” ordered my editor the second I arrived at work. As a lowly intern who spends her days checking e-mail at the Massachusetts State House, I didn’t stop to ask why. I just ran, notebook in hand and pen in hair.

On the morning of September 11, The Boston Globe was caught between choosing content and speed, just like every other paper in the nation. The longer we waited to publish an extra, the more information we’d have. We could wait until a 12:30 p.m. press conference with the governor and get more details about the connections between the attacks and the two planes that departed from Logan Airport.

But if we stalled too long, other papers would grab public attention and we’d be seen as behind the news. We went ahead and published, eager to establish our ground as a reliable source for readers to depend on for up-to-date information.

I found out about the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon not from turning on the TV but in chasing down a sound bite from Acting Gov. Jane Swift. And since Sept. 11, instead of sitting on the couch of a common room filled with people I trust, letting tears well in the corners of my eyes as they may, I have experienced this tragedy in a newsroom staffed by professionals armed with a seemingly unlimited reporting budget and who are unfettered by the distractions of college life.

A full 24 hours and one print news-cycle after the terrorist attacks, two if you count the rounds of extras produced by every paper from The Crimson to the Biloxi Sun Herald, the story behind the stories you read in the papers were who was getting the story and how.

While individual writers may collect their emotions in their reporting in fact, some of the best writing in recent memory has been the result of the tragedy—newspapers don’t wait for emotions before publishing. At first, the competition was over images: papers, limited by the frozen images of photography, competed for the best shots of the collapsing towers to grace their pages.

With just one subject for the front of every paper in the nation, photographers struggled to find a unique shot—any angle that was dramatic and different. The New York Times ran a photo of a man captured in a frame jumping from the burning tower. No captions necessary; the Times had won, with a different photograph that captured the enormity of the tragedy and set the paper apart from every other front page published in America.

After etching the image of the Trade Center in our minds, be it from the constantly replayed clip on TV or the cover of every periodical, the press had a different agenda. The race for the scoop began; the need to explain the enormity of what we all were experiencing with reasons and facts.

And it got dirty. Reporters swarmed around Logan in Boston, Ground Zero in New York and the Pentagon in D.C., trailing anyone who might provide a clue to the investigation. In the Globe newsroom, the bureau chief angrily turned off the TV when CNN claimed to have a list of passengers the Globe thought it had first.

The breaking news is getting more detailed and scoops are getting smaller. We are past the first weekly news cycle after the attack—you can tell because the weekly magazines all have shiny covers featuring the World Trade Center in some way; the New Yorker with its poignant all-black cover with vague outlines of the building and People Magazine’s altered color picture of the attack.

Now, the scoop is war, bombs and vengeance. The media has spun its cycle of terror and news services are racing to find people to blame. Lists of the dead and missing have appeared in smaller and smaller fonts in newspapers, and TV stations have ceased showing the planes flying into the World Trade Center.

But just because the pursuit of the scoop has pushed the news cycle forward, the enormity of the tragedy is nowhere near processed or mourned. The deceit of news is its relentless disregard for what is past. But don’t let the headlines that cry for war rather than scream of horror delude you that life will ever be the same. The process of mourning has just begun, even if the news has moved on.

Nicole B. Usher ’03-04, a Crimson editor, is a history concentrator in Cabot House. She is currently interning for the Boston Globe.