What 9/11 Taught Me About Trauma, Resilience, And Journalism

One of the first lessons I learned as a young, bright-eyed journalist is that being a good journalist means being an objective conduit of stories, moving at the lightning pace breaking news demands. A big story breaks, you move in, you cover it quickly, and under intense deadline pressure, you move on to the next assignment. That’s the rhythm and the expectation. 

Only, some stories don’t let you go that easily. They linger, they change you, and they end up staying with you long after the news cycle has ushered you on to the next headline. 

For me, one of those stories is the attacks on 9/11. I was two years out of college and still wet behind the ears as an aspiring network news producer, working at World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. I was a researcher, one of three people in a mid-sized office tucked away around the corner from where Peter Jennings and his team of senior-level producers cobbled together the broadcast each day. 

I was at home getting ready for work when the first plane slammed into the World Trade Center. Within an hour I was at my desk instead of the towers, fighting my lifelong urge to head straight to the center of any emergency. 

Instead, I was in the research department fielding and fact-checking unconfirmed reports of more planes headed toward high-level targets as fighter jets flew over our heads. We were based out of ABC News’ headquarters in New York, and it was hard not to wonder if we might be a target, too. Cell service was down across the city, forcing me to instant message the people I loved to tell them that I was alive and safe. 

That day turned into a 24-hour shift. Peter Jennings was, and still remains, one of the best broadcasters to ever sit behind a desk during breaking news. He had a way of becoming a proxy for the audience, staying stoic and composed, no matter what tragedy was unfolding before him. By the end of that long first day of endless reporting and covering the unimaginable, Jennings was on the air choked up, urging viewers to go check on their kids the way he’d checked in on his. We all seemed to know in that moment that our lives, and the world, would never be the same.

Months earlier, I’d been inside the World Trade Center with Jennings on a shoot, standing next to him in the areas built to be New York City’s control center in an emergency as our tour guide broke down how that nerve center would function if disaster struck. Those floors had been decimated in the attack and I wondered about our tour guide, the security guards, and everyone else who was so kind to us that day. I never found out if all of them had survived. 

The days that followed blurred together. I worked close to two weeks without a day off. Every day, I was surrounded by footage of the planes hitting the World Trade Center, the towers collapsing, and the aftermath. When I’d finally return home each night after a long shift in the newsroom, seeing those images on a loop, the only channel I could stand to watch was Cartoon Network. It was the only channel not talking about or showing what had happened. 

I went down to Ground Zero during that stretch. I had to witness the wreckage firsthand to make sure it was real. As I made my way down to where the World Trade Center once loomed so largely over the city, my N.Y. press badge swinging from my neck, I was unprepared for the missing posters covering every surface. Each one had a name, a face, a phone number urging anyone with information about their missing daughter, mother, father, or best friend. It broke my heart knowing that most if not all of the people in those photos were likely already gone. 

As we approached two weeks with a day off nowhere in sight, one of my fellow junior colleagues had asked a superior when we might have a day off because he was burnt out. A senior producer shut down that request swiftly, raising his voice and making it clear that we all needed to buck up and that what we were feeling didn’t come close to what he’d lived through covering war. The message was clear that we were expected to keep going without a single complaint, and that’s what we did. 

Part of my job in the days and weeks after the attacks was reviewing incoming footage, most too gruesome to air, shot by regular people who lived or worked nearby. People jumping off of the towers as flames threatened to engulf them. What happened on their way down, and then again when they landed. Those images have never left me, and it’s how I came to understand early on in my career that some stories never will. 

Some stories stay because of what they show you about humanity, the strangers that become heroes in their worst hour, the way grief can coexist with hope, how people at their lowest still reach out and help a stranger. 

Other stories linger because of what we witness that never makes it to air: the dead bodies, the blood, and the raw and gruesome parts of tragedy that get cut before broadcast but stay etched into our memories anyway. It is our job not to look away, to stand close enough where we often witness it firsthand, and because we don’t look away from tragedy, the people in our reporting often live inside of us. 

What I know now is that journalists experience trauma on par with first responders. The close proximity and repeated exposure. Back then, we were expected to suck it up because it was part of the job. There was no language for the trauma we were experiencing and no salve or support system built in to help us make sense of what we’d witnessed and the long term impact it might have on our brains and spirit. 

What covering 9/11 taught me has shaped who I have become as a journalist and as a news leader. I’ve since worked with reporters covering some of the biggest breaking news stories of this era. Reporters who have been the first to track down live footage of mass shootings in progress, reporters who have stood for hours doing live shots just feet away from dead bodies under white sheets. Producers who came back from Ukraine traumatized by the moment to moment terror of unpredictable air raid sirens. Reporters who had to interview parents just hours after they’d lost their kids to a school shooting. 

Teams I guided through Hurricane Katrina waded in waters as dead bodies floated past them. 

I’ve guided one of my most cherished mentees out of harm’s way after she was hit by a rubber bullet while covering a street protest. I’ve supported reporters who were doxxed and swatted, whose families were threatened because their reporting on misinformation made them targets. 

The danger for us as reporters doesn’t just live out in the field anymore. It follows us home, into our inboxes and our kids’ schools, long after our stories reach audiences. I’ve lived that, too. My coverage of Caitlin Clark and my investigative reporting on Diddy have brought personal threats, proof that none of us are as far removed from the stories we cover.

Newsrooms are finally starting to change. Mental health support, debriefs after covering trauma, and guidelines for how to care for journalists before, during, and after we’re sent into war zones are becoming the new standard. I’ve spent years helping build that change within and outside of newsrooms, creating the support systems I wish had existed back in 2001. 

A fellowship through the International Women’s Media Foundation trained me to become one of the first journalists certified to teach multilayered safety and preparedness to other journalists and bring that training into newsrooms. I consider it one of my most important contributions to journalism.

It’s been 25 years since the attacks, and most of my colleagues I shared a newsroom with that day have since scattered into different newsrooms and careers, now living in various cities around the world. Every year on 9/11, I check in with a colleague who sat beside me that day in research. We do a gentle check-in as we continue to reflect on that day. I light a candle and send up a prayer for all the lives lost and for all who lost a loved one that day. 

It’s a reminder that some stories don’t have a final chapter or a happy ending. They become a part of you forever.

SEE ALSO:

Remembering 9/11’s Unsung Black Heroes

The Most Compelling 9/11 Conspiracy Theories