feversmile

September 11, 2001 as a Photo Editor

Sept 11, 2001

8 years ago today our country was attacked with hijacked airplanes which, I’m sure we all remember exactly where and what we where doing at the time.

I was Photo Editor for AOL working on the CompuServe and Netscape portals. I was one of two editors on staff in Columbus, OH, the other was on vacation in Europe.
Where was I? When the first plane hit I was talking to co-worker Will Cowman next to my cube, someone came by and told us a plane had hit the World Trade Towers in NY. It didn’t sound like much, but I expected to start to get to work on it in about an hour when photos should start coming in on the wire services. Then someone came by and said another plane hit the other. This quickly ended whatever conversation Will and I where having and we headed over to the newsroom to see exactly what was going on.

There it was, the twin towers smoking, different networks replaying grainy video of a plane hitting the tower. We where under attack. Not long afterward there was word of a third plane going down somewhere in Pennsylvania. What was going on? Who was doing this and why? I really didn’t have time to think about, I had work to do. It wasn’t long before images started coming in over the wire. I hulled up in my cube, downloading images from AP, Getty, ZUMA Press, Reuters, and any other source I had access to. It was slow at first, I put together a photo gallery for the services with what I had. I worked with Jenifer Joseph the lead in the News team and Ginger Pullen the lead of the top of the service to continually push new images out to try to visually portray what might be happening to our viewers.

Then it happened, a flood images, more then I knew what to do with. Being the loan Photo Editor on staff at the time, I put my intern and all the design interns to work to pull images from the wires and categorize them into New York, Washington D.C. and Pennsylvania. From there I edited. This was the most important story I may work on my entire career and had to tell the general public what was happening.

Photos can tell a story far better then words at time like this. Dust, fire, devastation, confusion, falling bodies, people being thrown into being heroes if they wanted or not. The photos told the story. I even had photos directly from a fireman working on the scene in NYC from on of our news contacts. I built 23 galleries each with 12 images on Sept 11, 2001 to try to tell the story as best I could. 276 photos didn’t begin to tell it all. I editing photos that where possibly to disturbing to show the general public, but left a few in as well. They needed to be seen. The story was there and it wasn’t pretty.

I worked until 7:00 that night, went to our on site fitness center for an hour and went back to work until around 11 p.m. I remember saying goodbye to the security office on the way out, going home and watching the news until I fell asleep. I woke up wide awake around 4 in the morning took a shower and headed back to work. That same security guard was still on duty and asked what I was doing back already. I told him I had too much to work and couldn’t sleep anyway. He waved me in and nodded understandingly.

I have no idea how many more hours I worked the rest of that week. It didn’t matter either, it was where I needed to be and I wanted to help tell the story because everyone wanted as much information as well. That was the week I started listening to online radio at the same time I had CNN or MSNBC on the TV I had installed in my office. It helped me to understand why journalism important and ethics within the field is paramount.

A few galleries I was able to find:

http://webcenters.netscape.compuserve.com/celebrity/gallery.jsp?gname=worldtrade1

http://webcenters.netscape.compuserve.com/celebrity/gallery.jsp?gname=wtc_nyc

http://webcenters.netscape.compuserve.com/celebrity/gallery.jsp?gname=dcattack

http://webcenters.netscape.compuserve.com/celebrity/gallery.jsp?gname=escape

http://webcenters.netscape.compuserve.com/celebrity/gallery.jsp?gname=rescue1

http://webcenters.netscape.compuserve.com/celebrity/gallery.jsp?gname=rescue2

http://webcenters.netscape.compuserve.com/celebrity/gallery.jsp?gname=rescue3

This entry was posted on Friday, September 11th, 2009 at 2:56 pm and is filed under journalism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.