I have seen reporters crying at their telephones, even as they summoned the professional discipline to keep reporting, keep writing until the task was done. They were inspired and sometimes driven by an awareness of what these pieces had come to mean to the grieving families and friends and to that larger community of Americans who mourned for all the World Trade Center victims, strangers to them or not, just as in an earlier day their parents mourned for the dead of Pearl Harbor.
—NEW YORK TIMES EXECUTIVE EDITOR HOWELL RAINES, ON THE PREPARATION OF “PORTRAITS OF GRIEF”
Before work one morning, Gerald Boyd was relaxing in the barber chair. Then the world changed. The haircut was in preparation for a special dinner party that night. Just five days into his new job as the managing editor of the New York Times, Boyd would be joining the new editorial page editor Gail Collins and the executive editor Howell Raines at the home of the publisher Arthur Sulzberger. It was also primary election day—a nice little exercise for a Metro desk with the extraordinary talent of the Times. But certainly there seemed to be nothing on the horizon that warm late-summer morning to jeopardize dinner at the publisher’s.
The barber was Haitian and spoke French and Creole and little English. Boyd liked it that way. “We didn’t have to engage in conversations, and he could do his business without talking about world affairs,” Boyd said. To catch a breeze, the shop’s door was open. “Someone walked in and yelled to the barber, ‘Have you heard about the plane that crashed into the Twin Towers?’” The words were hardly spoken when Boyd leapt from under the scissors. “I ran out with the smock still on, fishing money out for him, saying, I have to go. He didn’t understand what I was saying. He said he wasn’t finished.”
The barbershop was sixty-five blocks north of Times Square, where the newsroom was in desperate need of its new managing editor. Boyd tried the subway: no service. “Police action at the World Trade Center,” the announcement said. He stopped a gypsy cab willing to make the trip. His fifty dollars and his constant urging for the driver to ignore the speed limit—“If you get a ticket, I’ll pay,” Boyd shouted—paid off. In fifteen minutes he was in the office. On a newsroom television he was able to watch early film of the second plane hitting, eighteen minutes after the first strike.
1The Culture Kicks In
An outsider looking at the job ahead for Boyd, Raines, and other New York Times “masthead editors” might see September 11 as a nearly uncoverable local, national, and global story. But Boyd, who for eight years had served as an assistant managing editor and then a deputy managing editor before assuming the managing editorship the prior week, saw a ritual play out that was no less amazing because it was expected. At least, it was expected at the Times. “The culture of the New York Times kicks in, and that culture is that certain things become automatic,” he said. The A-book—the paper’s first section—was immediately opened up, its ads cleared out. That happened on any huge story: the Berlin Wall coming down, the first Gulf War, or the earlier 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. The A-book had been opened a dozen times since Boyd had been in management.
Planning his staff’s day under such pressure, his mind adjusted with each new shock. “As we watched the tube it was soon clear that we were dealing with an incredible story. But what struck me most about it—and it’s kind of strange—was when I learned that Air Force One had been zigzagging.” Having been a White House correspondent, he knew all that was done to keep the president’s plane insulated from the world outside. “I always felt extremely safe, and if they were taking these extreme measures, it made it even more frightening.”
Boyd made two decisions within minutes. One was to pull all the staff that had been assigned to cover the election—essentially everyone on Metro staff—and recapture the space in the paper that was dedicated to the primary. It was a bit of a gamble but paid off quickly when the crush of events forced the vote’s cancellation. (“When I made the call I didn’t know that,” he noted.) The decision had given the paper a head start. The second order was to create a series of meetings for the day to coordinate coverage “and get a handle on what the nature of the story was.” That call had been made easier given the rapid unfolding of events: the Towers collapsed; thousands were feared dead downtown; the president made a statement that it was a terrorist attack; the Pentagon was hit; and another plane crashed in Pennsylvania (after initial, erroneous reports saying it was in Ohio). “We knew four planes had been used as guided missiles,” Boyd recalled. “That was basically enough for us to begin staking the outlines of that report.”
Freeing the A-book of ads had created some immediate needs. “You had twenty or thirty pages that were open. How do you package those pages? And again the culture of the paper was such that we knew how to do that,” Boyd noted. “The need first of all is to break down the pages—four pages on collapse of the buildings, four on victims…. What we had learned to do was to have a packaging meeting that did these kinds of things—to deal only with design, presentation and look”—keeping design decisions away from the news meetings. “We weren’t reinventing the wheel.” Amid the chaos, it was a reassuring thought. The questions had been asked before, even if the scale might have been different: “How do we coordinate a Washington staff, a foreign-bureau staff, and Metro staff? And how much overall space to commit?”
As staffers tried to focus fully on the “battlefield coverage” they were suddenly engaged in, personal worries crept in. Boyd was no exception. With phones not working in the city, he could not contact his wife, who worked in the same area as an editor at Essence magazine. “Was she at the World Trade Center or in the vicinity?” he wondered. It would be five o’clock before they finally got in touch.
He led the 11:00 a.m. news meeting. “We didn’t talk about stories. We talked about what we knew, what we needed to know, and how we’d get there. Then we came back around noon.” That meeting covered story assignments. “Then we had a 4:30 news meeting, and right after that we had our design people begin to lay out the pages.” Editors assembled for a photo meeting an hour later and then for a design meeting. “We had incredible art, and a whole lot of it,” said Boyd. Page layouts went on until about eight o’clock. He was home by 4 a.m.—without a thought, of course, for the canceled Sulzberger dinner party.
With staffers the caliber of the
Times’s, great notes were pouring in along with the great pictures. When reporter David Barstow heard about the attacks, he was driving back from Pennsylvania, where he and another writer had been covering a Little League baseball scandal involving an overage player from the Bronx. With the tunnels and bridges into the city closed, they took the Tappan Zee Bridge north of the city and then went south into the Bronx until traffic allowed them to go no further. “I jogged from 243rd Street down to 168th Street, then took the subway to the newsroom,” says Barstow. By 8:30 p.m. he was at Ground Zero, having avoided the police who were assigned to keep reporters and others away. He spent the next several days there, he says, “feeding stuff back to the newsroom from the American Express Building while dodging the cops, who were constantly doing sweeps to get reporters like me out of there.”
2Because such enterprise was going on all around the managing editor, this assessment by Boyd may not sound quite so incredible. “The first night was, in a way, the easiest night,” he said, “once we learned the dimensions of the story.” Again, that Times culture was guiding reporters and editors. Tougher newsroom decisions were ahead.
Breaking Through the Abstraction
Christine Kay would also never forget the incongruous little scene that got her to bolt for the office without a thought. The enterprise editor for Metro was on her sofa at home in Chelsea with a cup of coffee. She planned to report to work a little later than usual because of the expected late demands of the primary coverage. Her eye half on the TV, she saw what appeared to be some strange movie: a plane, the flames in one of the Twin Towers. “I jumped up and literally ran the twenty blocks north to the office to watch the second plane hitting,” she says. “And we all started to work.”
3A former
Newsday editor who now reported to the
Times Metro editor Jonathan Landman, Kay had been editing a piece on adult homes for the mentally ill. On September 11, it was set aside. She has little recollection of what her hour-to-hour actions were that first day, except that she marshaled forces for Landman and served as a contact for reporters at Ground Zero and throughout the city. Gradually she began to focus on the victims, taking charge of each missing-person report in those first few days. The identification of the dead would come much later.
Times culture or no Times culture, there were really no precedents for the scope of this catastrophe when it came to the newspaper dealing with victims. Not in peacetime, anyway. “I was here for TWA 800,” Kay says, recalling the July 17, 1996, air disaster that killed 230 people off the coast of Long Island. But those victims were known as soon as the passenger list was in hand. September 11 offered few comparisons. “We had no idea what we were facing,” she says. “For the first three days I was coming in to a budget line that said Zero-Zero victims; Zero-Zero firefighters.” That meant that even rough estimates of the dead were lacking, both among those who happened to be in the World Trade Center and those among the first responders trying to save them.
The TWA crash did suggest some obvious approaches to editors looking to help readers grasp a mass-death situation. Even if there are hundreds of victims, “you start writing about them in real ways, intimate ways,” Kay says. “You write about the group of school kids who were going to France. You write about the neighbors who were killed, or the husband and wife, or the girls who were left behind. You find small ways to report on it, and there is an immediacy about it.” But in the collapse of the Twin Towers, there were untold thousands of lives lost—with an emphasis, in those early days, on the “untold.”
In her role advising Metro on how to develop victim coverage, the challenge was finding an approach that would speak to readers and reduce what she calls the “abstraction” of so many deaths all at once. She tried to plan something, but there was little time. Thoughts of something like “Portraits of Grief,” though not yet by that name, floated to her first on the breeze that carried so many sad, desperate flyers. Posters pleading for information about the thousands missing had started to appear all over the city. A reporter did one story on the phenomenon. “I started to pick them up and collected them next to my desk in that week,” Kay recalls.
“I know people want to hear that we had this thoughtful conversation and sat in a room for three hours, and came up with this magical approach,” she says. “But that is not what happened.” What did happen was that the pressure built from day to day with the thought that “for better or worse, we had to do something about the victims.” The challenge for Kay and other editors was to find the time to discuss the various options for their paper to make these victims become real people for readers and to reduce the abstraction of the still-unknown death count. “We’d steal five minutes here and five minutes there,” she says. “In one stolen five minutes, it came up that thumbnail sketches had been used before.” The
Times and others had used them in writing about the 168 victims of the 1995 Oklahoma City federal building bombing, for example. Kay thought a different approach was needed here. She discussed various alternatives with reporter Janny Scott. Previous mass-death treatments were “too telegraphic,” Kay says. “They had birth date, where they went to school…. They weren’t impressionistic.” And impressionism, rather than obituary-style detail, was needed to help readers see these victims as real people. Two hundred words seemed a good length to Kay and Scott.
Kay had edited the “Public Lives” profiles that ran in the second section, where she had sought to build impressions of the subjects by using a single character element—a hobby, a passion—and building on it. “I thought one of the most successful things about them was when they luxuriated in one little tantalizing tidbit,” she says. To qualify for such a public-life study, the person, sometimes a celebrity, had to be elsewhere in the news. “The reader got a very intimate profile—a very distinctive, often one-interview profile that made you feel like you were inside the room with them,” says Kay. Maybe something like that could work. But could it be reduced to two hundred words?
The time came for a Metro meeting. “Jon laid some approaches on the table,” says Kay. One was the telegraphic bio approach. “Both Janny and I thought that would be very unsatisfying and mind-numbing.” Hanging over the editors was the uncertainty of the total count. “We still thought there were ten thousand to twenty thousand dead, and if the goal was to make that less abstract, the bios weren’t going to do it.”
There was another thought: “What if these people aren’t really dead?” The profiles, whatever they were, would have to avoid the feel of an obituary. Kay was after a sense of lives interrupted. “So we thought, ‘What if you just choose one aspect of life? What if you focus on this one woman gardening, one man taking his daughter to ice-skating lessons, or maybe smoking cigars?’” Indeed, the definition of the new profile approach grew as much from what it would
not be. “These are not obits, and this is not about death. This is not about professional achievement. These are not people who would ordinarily appear in the
New York Times obituary page.”
The editors’ thinking about a style for the profiles began to take on the feel of a mission to Kay—to design something that would work with the overall coverage approach evolving around them. That coverage reflected “a level playing field,” she says. “People who were in the upper echelons of these [investment] trading groups were to be treated in the same way as the dishwashers at Windows on the World.”
It was Friday morning, September 14. “I grabbed this bunch of missing posters, which was really handy because they had photographs on them, and I took Janny Scott and five other reporters into Jon Landman’s office,” says Kay. “It was very important that they happened to be some of the best reporters in the place. We divided up the posters and they went at it.”
On Saturday the first series of mini profiles—not yet “Portraits”—ran under the heading: “After the Attacks: Among the Missing.” Below that was the kicker line “The Names” and below that was another headline: “Snapshots of Their Lives with Family and at Work.” These paragraphs introduced the first day’s collection:
It has been four days since the World Trade Center was destroyed. Thousands of people who were in the towers at the time are assumed to be dead. But the official body count stands at 124, and the medical examiner has identified only a few dozen victims. It could be months before many of those killed can be officially confirmed dead.
In the meantime, there is the interminable registry of the missing, nearly 5,000 people whose friends and families have reported their names to the police in the hope that they are alive. With each passing day, those hopes grow dimmer. They are fathers, daughters, fiancés and best friends. Bond traders, boxing aficionados and chefs. People expecting babies, planning their weddings, hoping for promotions. Firefighters and police officers who raced to the scene after the first jet crashed. And people who set off for work on a dazzling September morning and met with something unimaginably horrible. Here are glimpses of some of those lives.
The next day, on September 16, the rubric “Portraits of Grief” made its first appearance over the profiles. The top half of the page was devoted to a picture layout of the posters and below was the text.
Who had come up with the “Portraits” name? Lots of ideas were bandied about, all avoiding use of “the dead.” With the posters in mind, Howell Raines had tossed out “The Street Art of Despair.” It was a starting point. As desk editors used the typical process of free association, the word “portraits” seemed to stick and variations like “Portraits of Despair,” “Portraits of Sorrow,” “Portraits of Mourning,” “Portraits of Grief,” and “Portraits of Loss” made the rounds. Recalling the process in an in-house newsletter, Patrick LaForge, then an assistant Metro editor on the night shift, said he flipped “a mental coin” and made “Portraits of Grief” the front-runner. “I wasn’t in love with the phrase, but I figured we could change it.” The next day was his day off, so LaForge suggested in an e-mail to the next night’s desk editor that he think up something else. “Then I went for a bicycle ride, fell, and broke my thumb,” wrote LaForge. He was in the emergency room and missed the editor’s reply. Things had been so hectic in the newsroom that editors had just continued using “Portraits of Grief.”
4Birth of “A Nation Challenged”
Well into the first week after the attacks, managing editor Boyd maintained the office meeting routine. It was built around four daily news sessions, with one devoted to layout. But it quickly became clear that the A-book format wouldn’t work for the long haul. “We were throwing ads out of the A-book at considerable cost to the paper, so the issue became how long do we want to do this,” he said. Advertisers paid $100,000 per page for the A-book. There were no notes from the Times business side or from the publisher, Boyd said, but editors were aware of the costs and began looking for an alternative that could be applied right away.
“What was obvious was the need for stories to be packaged together,” Boyd said. And a fifth section couldn’t simply be added because the
Times had a physical limit of four sections capable of carrying the prior day’s news. Besides the normal
Times A section—including foreign and national coverage—there was a separate Metro section, a Sports section, and a fourth section that varied according to the day (Science on Tuesdays, for example).
As war began raging in Afghanistan and other reports with ties to 9/11 sprouted around the globe, the nation, and the nation’s largest city, the range of stories was vast. Having space for it all was vital. “We wanted an open section—a section without ads—so that we could present the most impressive displays,” said Boyd. “The question became what section do we do this in.” As the masthead editors met, there was a huge, if unspoken, worry: if “A Nation Challenged” ended up sharing an editor’s section, that editor could lose a front page to the new report.
A brainstorm by the Times assistant managing editor Tom Bodkin, though, solved the problem of “losing” the page. He proposed that Sports and Metro share a section, but in a peculiar way. Sports would keep its “front” on the back page—upside down, so that readers would have to flip the section and read toward the center. With that minor adjustment, Sports readers had their accustomed front pages while “A Nation Challenged” stood alone, devoid of ads, with two-page spreads for display inside.
On the first Monday after 9/11—the regular meeting day for Boyd and Raines with the publisher—they showed a mock-up of the section to Sulzberger. It was a hit. The section heading “A Nation Challenged” had been proposed by veteran assistant managing editor Allan M. Siegal. As Siegal recalls it, “I scribbled a few possible section rubrics on a scrap of paper and caught Howell Raines on his way out of the office and asked him to choose.” “A Nation Challenged” had been Siegal’s favorite too, he says.
5In determining the mix of stories in the newly named section, the guiding principle was to augment and complement what was appearing on page one. “We looked at the stories we had fronted. Then we thought about the front of A Nation Challenged, and how we could use that to make different points journalistically,” said Boyd. The approach accommodated each wrinkle as the nature of this gigantic story morphed—war in Afghanistan, anthrax-laced mail, the flow of local profiles. The new section gave editors an accepted alternative to use. Without the section, a major article would probably start with five column inches on page one and jump inside. Did writers feel it was a step down to lose that small front-page display and instead to see their stories fronted on “A Nation Challenged”? “There may have been that feeling in the beginning,” Boyd said, “but not later on.” No single editor ever ran “A Nation Challenged.” Boyd called the section “a collaboration of numerous editors” over which he and Raines retained the final say.
FIGURE 3.1 Tuesday, September 18, 2001, the first day the New York Times “A Nation Challenged” section ran. Source: Copyright © 2001, The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission.
Besides “Portraits”—the purview of the Metro staff—a feature that was Raines’s invention also took root within “A Nation Challenged.” Described by staffers as “all known thought,” this journalism form allowed significant issues to be featured in a special, cerebral way. “‘Portraits’ spoke to the heart and All Known Thought spoke to the mind,” according to Boyd. “It proved especially valuable because it became an anchor, and it allowed us to spend a day exploring an issue, like a history of al Qaeda, and produce a comprehensive story that explains it.” With all the open pages, the third “anchor” became art—large, well-packaged photos that told a story all by themselves. That the Times ended up winning Pulitzers for breaking news and feature photography in addition to public service was an indication of that success.
A Portrait of “Portraits”
As a daily facet of the section, “Portraits of Grief” took on a life of its own. While missing posters still prompted some vignettes, gradually employee lists from companies at the World Trade Center and lists of firefighters and police became available for reporters to use in assembling the profiles. The size of the operation grew. “It became this huge machine. We had ten to thirteen reporters working on it non-stop,” says Kay.
Reporters volunteered to contribute, some even coming from Washington, D.C. to play a part. The items’ short length was deceptive. Emotion aside—and it rarely was—they were hard to write. “They were exhausting and absolutely overreported,” says Kay, noting that often multiple sources were consulted to get the information right. “There was no glamour here. It was something you didn’t have a byline on.” Instead, writers’ names appeared in a credit box, not even connected to the particular portrait they produced. Yet 143 reporters participated in the project, some for a day or two, others through much of its fifteen-week run.
Subscribers from around the country turned to “A Nation Challenged” first thing after the paper arrived. Or last. One of the many readers that wrote to the
Times in praise of “Portraits” said she could not drop off to sleep at night without having read them. Jeff Bray of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, wrote: “Nothing—and I mean NOTHING—I have ever read in my life has moved me as much as these riveting windows into the lives of ordinary people.” At least one paper, the
Oregonian in faraway Portland, ran “Portraits” in their entirety.
6 Christine Kay summarizes the feature as delivering this message: “My God, New Yorkers are just like the rest of us. They take their kids ice-skating, and they like Bart Simpson, and they play soccer. Those New Yorkers, they’re really Americans.”
Still, as one of its editors, Kay did hear complaints—from relatives of those featured in the columns. “Some were upset that we weren’t talking about more traditional things,” she says. “We weren’t talking about the accomplishments, but things that they perceived to be trivial or prosaic. Or a mother was upset that we took what the daughter-in-law remembered, or vice versa.” Editors would explain that the idea had been to focus more “on the passion than the professional accomplishment.”
Most were moved by the collective power of “Portraits,” however. Howell Raines wrote in the book
Portraits 9/11/01: “These lives, bundled together so randomly into a union of loving memory by those terrible cataclysms of September 11, remind us of what Walt Whitman knew: ‘The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.’” Metro editor Landman “resisted any suggestion that we abandon our rhythm of a page or two pages every day until the end of 2001.” Raines added: “Among the reporters, another kind of democracy—the democracy of craftsmanship—came into play. Often, on so huge a story as the World Trade Center disaster, the writing of shorter pieces falls to younger reporters. On the ‘Portraits’ project, it became an emblem of pride to join in the largely anonymous labor of creating these pieces; some of our most senior correspondents insisted on participating.”
7From an editor’s view, there were some rules to consider. “We tried never to mention that day,” says Kay. Balance was important from item to item. “You certainly didn’t want too many Bart Simpson lovers and too many cigar-smoking stockbrokers in the same day.” To help achieve balance without being “formulaic,” as Kay puts it, a large backlog of “Portraits” was collected in the first month and then grouped to be run. “It was the ultimate group effort,” says Kay, who is still stunned by the how “Portraits” came together. A group effort, that is, in every case but one.
In a bizarre footnote, disgraced Times reporter Jayson Blair was later to become entwined with “Portraits of Grief”—even though he had not written a single vignette. In the report prepared by the New York Times analyzing Blair’s errors during his time at the paper before he was discovered in 2002 to be fabricating articles, it was disclosed that he had begged off doing assignments for “Portraits.” A cousin of his had died in the Pentagon bombing, he said. It turned out, however, that the cousin had been another of his fabrications. “It’s too ugly to even go there,” says Christine Kay, who does not like to talk about Blair. (Blair resigned after his false reporting was revealed.)
David Barstow was on the team assigned to look into Blair’s record at the newspaper and thus learned early about the cousin’s invention. “That tidbit about Jayson hit a very deep nerve inside this building,” Barstow says.
8 “Blair gamed that situation,” was how Gerald Boyd put it. “At the publisher’s insistence, we put together a list of all
Times employees throughout the building, to find out who had lost relatives in the attacks. And it was in that sense we were told about Jayson.” The
Times treated employees who had lost loved ones compassionately and Blair benefited—especially when he started being caught in a series of reporting mistakes and was given special treatment because of his supposed loss of a cousin. In the wake of the Blair plagiarism scandal, Boyd and Howell Raines both resigned from the
Times in June 2003. (Boyd, fifty-six, died of complications from lung cancer in November 2006, a few months after being interviewed for this book.)
FIGURE 3.2 The New York Times managing editor Gerald Boyd steps to the microphone with publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger’s encouragement on the day of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize announcements. To the right, executive editor Howell Raines looks on. Others present include Jonathan Landman (behind Boyd) and, next to him, Thomas Friedman. Source: Copyright © 2002, The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission.
While the gold medal was among the record seven Pulitzers garnered by the
Times that year, the celebration among editors and staffers was muted.
9 “I had very mixed feelings,” said Boyd. “I had seen first-hand the extraordinary job that the staff of the
Times had done. I knew how difficult it was on people. I knew reporters who lost friends in the Twin Towers. I knew of people who had been down in Battery Park when the Towers collapsed and barely survived. And I knew of people who went to Afghanistan for us and had incredible medical problems that they’re probably still trying to deal with.” Still, “I also felt that the world had changed in a fundamental way. And so in that sense, all of this was more than just journalism. It wasn’t about prizes.” For Christine Kay, there was less conflict. “You want to know my personal thoughts? I wish they’d canceled the Pulitzers. Certainly one felt good about the effort and how ‘Portraits’ became this national touchstone. But I think everyone would rather not be standing there at all.”
Few metropolitan news organizations will ever confront a challenge like 9/11 and its aftermath. But many will face the shock of a sudden community crisis that requires total staff commitment at a moment’s notice—whether a raging storm, a horrific accident, or a major crime. In such instances, “A Nation Challenged” may offer some lessons. “Editors should understand that inspiration comes from a lot of different places, and you’ve got to have a mechanism that encourages people,” said Boyd. The section and its “Portraits” feature served to inspire staffers just as it inspired readers. “I was always amazed how on a given day, someone I never would have thought of would have a brilliant idea. There was really a belief that people could be heard.”
In his mind, the
Times’s performance also underscored the value of avoiding the kinds of severe retrenchments that weaken a staff’s ability to react to major events. “As executives and editors try to balance the cost of good journalism with the need for profits, they should think about a couple of things,” said Boyd. When “A Nation Challenged” began, “the circulation of the newspaper went up 100,000 copies. The public was saying, ‘If you are relevant, if you are trying to address things we care about, and if you are doing it in a way that provides quality, we’ll come along.’”
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2002—The
New York Times for “A Nation Challenged,” a special section published regularly after the September 11th terrorist attacks on America, which coherently and comprehensively covered the tragic events, profiled the victims, and tracked the developing story, locally and globally.
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