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The Journal on the Run
BY
RUSS BAKER
Shortly
before 8 a.m. on September 11, Jim Pensiero, an assistant managing
editor for The Wall Street Journal, was crossing a pedestrian
bridge to the Journal's offices in the World Financial Center,
across the street from the World Trade Center. On the way, he
ran into Andrea Carabillo, an Italian software developer who had
been fine-tuning an upgrade version of the Journal's new Hermes
pagination system. Carabillo was returning to his hotel for some
rest, having been at the paper since 6:30 a.m. fixing a bug in
the upgrade. The system had been installed just two days earlier,
part of a broader, ongoing effort to make the Journal more technologically
robust and better prepared to weather emergencies.
Talk about timing. At 9 a.m., Pensiero was engrossed in his work
when a call from his wife sent him rushing to the Page One offices.
There, with several colleagues, including managing editor Paul
Steiger, he watched in disbelief as flames roared from the north
tower. "Papers fell toward the street," he would later
recall, "like some sort of bizarre ticker tape parade."
As Pensiero describes it, Steiger reacted instantly, asking him
about backup scenarios in the event of an evacuation. Pensiero
mentioned the "campus" maintained by the Journal's parent
company, Dow Jones, about an hour's drive away in South Brunswick,
New Jersey. The facility, which houses back-office personnel,
had been outfitted in the past eighteen months with a couple of
classroom-sized spaces full of computer workstations. And in recent
months Journal editors, under Pensiero's direction, had spent
a couple of Saturday mornings practicing making up the paper there,
in case of an emergency. Pensiero, whom Steiger labels the Journal's
September 11 "General Patton," ordered up a full deployment
to the location; Journal technology chieftains Bill Godfrey and
Bland Smith were already in motion. They had not waited a minute
too soon, for, right in the middle of Pensiero's calls, a tremendous
jolt hit the offices -- the second hijacked airliner slamming
into the Trade Center.
Pensiero ran back to his office, and was preparing an email message
to key editors when an evacuation order came over the public address
system. Steiger stopped by to say he was headed outside to find
his wife, who worked nearby. He and Pensiero could rendezvous
out front and head south together. Pensiero tried to finish his
note, and was still typing when a security guard ordered him out
on the double. He hit "send" and grabbed his coat. On
the street, he couldn't find Steiger, and first one and then a
second police officer asked him to move out of the area toward
the Hudson River.
Then he saw a man jump from a high floor of the north tower. "I
knew I had to go; I couldn't help any of these poor people,"
he says. "My boss had given me an assignment, and now I must
flee this place of death and try to get my job done." Pensiero,
who commutes from New Jersey, hopped a ferry; it was just pulling
into Jersey City when the south tower collapsed, in Pensiero's
words, with "a sickening roar. I couldn't believe what I
was seeing." Having caught the last ferry from downtown Manhattan,
he found an open station of the PATH rapid transit system and
took what turned out to be the last train to Newark, where he
retrieved his car and headed south. He was jolted further when
he glanced east. Both towers had vanished.
The South Brunswick offices seemed from another world -- a comfortable,
modern, suburban campus with expansive green lawns. The two "emergency"
newsrooms were ready to go, and staff had prepared additional
ones, so that fifty-five workstations were operational -- most
with the Hermes pagination and editing software that Carabillo
had installed. Pensiero was further relieved to see that the Journal's
copy chief, Jesse Lewis, was on the premises.
Almost miraculously, Carabillo's upgrade had just been completed,
two months behind schedule, and the South Brunswick servers were
up and running with the enhanced version of the pagination and
news editing software. When the decision was made to evacuate,
technicians, relying on backup power from generators, were able
to transfer editorial data out of World Financial Center servers.
The Journal also had on hand a news prepress team, whose usual
job was to prepare financial statistics pages, and who jumped
readily into the task of pagination.
News of the first plane crash had reached Marcus Brauchli, the
national editor, at home in Brooklyn Heights, across the East
River from lower Manhattan. Brauchli and a colleague tried crossing
the Brooklyn Bridge by foot against a swelling throng heading
out of the city, but he thought better of it and returned to his
apartment. His phone service was intermittent but he found he
could reach people via an internal company e-mail system over
his DSL line. In all, he sent more than 500 messages that day,
and read more than 1,000, often responding with a simple Yes or
No. He was more detailed in his frequent e-mails to Dow Jones
chairman Peter Kann, who was in Hong Kong for the twenty-fifth
anniversary of The Asian Wall Street Journal. At about 10:30,
Brauchli notified his bureau chiefs that there would be a paper,
and before long, lists of pending stories were flowing in.
Steiger, who hadn't been heard from for several nerve-wracking
hours, finally e-mailed at 1 p.m. to say he'd been caught in the
dust cloud when the towers collapsed. He convened a group of about
ten editors at the upper west side apartment of Barney Calame,
a deputy managing editor, who had two computers and a working
phone. Page one came together in an online collaboration with
the paper's designers. They fashioned a headline: terrorists destroy
world trade center, hit pentagon in raid with hijacked jets.
In South Brunswick, more staffers straggled in, including advertising
and graphics personnel, and a handful of editors. "I wanted
to cry on seeing them, but I wasn't quite ready to show my emotions,"
says Pensiero. By 5 p.m., just 45 of the usual Manhattan retinue
of 140 or so editors, paginators, and graphics people who usually
put out the paper were on hand. Pensiero grabbed whoever he could
and pressed them into duty. Some copy editors were told that,
for the day, they were Page One editors. Many reporters worked
from wherever they were; in some cases, filing from cars and phone
booths.
At 7 p.m., John Bussey, the foreign editor, arrived in South Brunswick
and began pounding out a first-person account. His office faces
the south tower, and he saw it collapse, diving under a desk when
the windows blew out. Bussey stayed on for a time, filing on-air
updates to Journal content partner CBNC. His gripping account
made it into a replated front page.
Remarkably, given its location, Dow Jones did not lose a single
person, although many traumatized staffers have availed themselves
of counseling services. (A manager in the graphics department,
who lived near the Trade Center, lost everything she owned; colleagues
have since overwhelmed her with donated goods.) Steiger says he
cannot shake the image of people jumping from the burning towers.
"To realize those were not things falling, but human beings
. . . ," he says. "I'm sure others have similar things
branded on their conscious and subconscious that will be with
them for a long, long time."
For the moment, the Journal is operating from a variety of locations
-- South Brunswick for most editors, technical, and production
staff, plus satellite offices in Manhattan, primarily for reporters.
Damage to the World Financial Center, mostly from cascading debris,
did not affect structural integrity and although some jobs (notably
the copy desk) will remain in South Brunswick and others will
be dispersed, the Journal will reclaim its newsroom at some point.
"My guess is winter," Steiger says.
In the end, the Journal helped calm the nation's financial community
by just being there on September 12. "One thing we have been
astonished by was how much people around the country were comforted
by the fact the Journal was in their driveway the next day,"
Steiger says. Indeed, all but 180,000 of the usual 1.8 million
copies were distributed. To the average reader, there were few
signs -- two sections instead of three, for example -- of the
challenge it had been to publish.
The primary sign of a tectonic shift, of course, was Page One.
This was only the second time in the 112-year history of the cool-headed
daily that events seemed to justify a banner headline. The first
was Pearl Harbor.
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Russ Baker is a contributing editor to CJR.
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