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Deadline reporting: terrorism on September 11.

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Abstract

As the eyes and ears of the community, journalists must cover disasters--natural and man-made. Yet it's difficult to teach students how to cover a tragedy or how to write a story under harrowing circumstances in the classroom setting, where discussion is theoretical and reactions can only be imagined. September 11th presented an opportunity to convey a lesson in reporting and writing that might stay with my students for years to come. But I hesitated to take that opportunity. Were my students ready? Was I?

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On September 11th, I was scheduled to teach a weekly class in Deadline Reporting to the graduate students in the journalism program at Concordia. An hour before the noontime class, a handful of students stood outside my office door. I'm a native New Yorker, transplanted to Canada in 1990, and I'd shed some tears in private that morning already, unable to reach my own family members in Manhattan. When I came to the door to greet my students, my eyes, I'm certain, mirrored the same shock, uncertainty and numbness that their eyes carried. They wanted to know if there would be a class. At that moment, I really didn't know. The director of the journalism department told me I didn't have to teach if I didn't feel up to it. I still hadn't made contact with my family at that point, and was particularly worried about my sister, who worked near the financial district. And, underneath the worry, I had sentimental feelings. I was married in Tower One of the World Trade Center in Windows on the World. Now, the memory of that unusually warm Saturday night in November, when a massive New York traffic jam almost made me late for my own wedding, played over and over in my mind.

Should I teach? Could I teach? And if I did teach, what would I teach? I had planned to have a young reporter from Canadian Press (CP) talk about her own experiences reporting on deadline in the second half of the class. I'd set up the event as an assignment, whereby the students would "cover" her talk and then immediately exit the classroom to write a story on deadline. Now, with the magnitude of unfolding events, the topic of Deadline Reporting seemed at once particularly pertinent yet strangely irrelevant. How could I ask students to fully concentrate on a speaker when world events were so distracting? And how could I ask them to write up the talk after class, when they, like everyone else, would want to focus on the events into which we were all...

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