Mark Nathanson
I was asleep in my bed in my Upper West Side apartment when the ringing of the telephone woke me. "Marc, I just walked past the World Trade Center," said a friend calling from his cell phone, "and it looks like a plane just crashed into the building."
"You're kidding," I said, and immediately dialed NY1's assignment editor, finally reaching him on the tenth ring. "Colin, the World Trade Center -"
"- We're on it," he said.
I hung up and flipped on my TV. It was only four minutes since the events began, but already NY1 had a live picture of the Twin Towers from our camera atop the Empire State Building. Smoke was billowing from the north tower as our morning anchor described the scene.
At the computer on my desk I called up NY1.com, where our Primary Day coverage was the website's top story. I accessed the site's content management system and typed:
"The World Trade Center was rocked by an explosion this morning when an airplane struck one of the building's twin towers, witnesses say. The blast occurred shortly before 9 a.m. Emergency crews have been called to the scene."
Three simple sentences - just the basics. The details would follow. I hit the "submit" button and published the terse description as the site's lead story.
I called the writer on duty at my office but got no answer.
Sixteen minutes since the plane hit the tower and back on television things were looking even worse - flames now shot up from the building, and the south tower was now on fire. But something was wrong: with more than 100 feet separating the two towers, the fire shouldn't have spread from one to the other. On NY1, anchor Pat Kiernan was discussing the possibility that a second plane had struck the complex, but that seemed impossible. Then the station replayed a shot from just moments before, and there on the screen was a blip in the sky heading right toward the skyscraper.
Why would a second plane crash in the same spot as the first? I opened up my story and inserted another paragraph after the lead:
"Shortly thereafter, the second World Trade Center tower was damaged by what appeared to be another airplane."
I finally got the morning writer on the phone and learned the latest - it was two planes, both of them large passenger jets. It looked like a possible terrorist attack. I handed off the story to the writer and told him I'd be right in.
A terrorist attack on the World Trade Center? My mind raced as I fumbled with my shoelaces. What might be next? The Statue of Liberty, the Chrysler Building, the Empire State?
On my computer screen, I re-read my brief story. There are five W's in journalism, and the simple sentences contained four of them: who, what, when and where.
The "why" would only come later.
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