Post-Sept. 11, reporting with 'a different sensibility'

Jack Brimeyer stood in the Peoria Journal Star's newsroom on that unforgettable September morning a year ago and watched as the towers of the World Trade Center crumbled and the world changed forever. Among his many thoughts as the horror unfolded was a fleeting personal one. "My life as a journalist will never be the same," he told himself.

If the past year is any indicator, he was right. It was a different and challenging time for Brimeyer, the Journal Star's managing editor, as it has been for newspaper editors all over America. A world in turmoil has forced them to think and work in new ways, a process that has both frustrated them and brought them new sources of satisfaction.

Sept. 11 produced immediate and dramatic changes as newspapers rushed special editions into the streets, then stretched their staffs and budgets to the breaking point with weeks, and in some cases months, of expanded coverage. But aside from the commemorative coverage marking the first anniversary of the attacks, those Herculean efforts have since faded, giving way to more subtle changes at most papers - "a different sensibility," says Bennie Ivory, executive editor of The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky.

Editors have worked to find ways to give readers more of the national and international news they need without cutting back on the local news that most newspapers consider to be at the heart of their franchises. They've struggled, too, to put a fresh face on the huge events of the past year and to find local relevance wherever possible.

Above all, they have tried to do what newspapers have always prided themselves on doing in critical times: explain complicated stories clearly. With so much at stake, there could be no more important or difficult job for the journalists of any generation.

As any reader interested in world events is aware, most U.S. newspapers haven't been enthusiastic purveyors of international news in recent years. With the exception of the largest dailies, most papers have emphasized local news so strongly that only the biggest international stories make the paper, much less the front page.

So it's noteworthy that one of the biggest impacts of Sept. 11 was a renewed interest in international and national news, a situation that created a problem for suburban newspapers like The Oakland Press, a 75,000-circulation daily just north of Detroit.

"Local news is the one thing we think we can do better than anyone else," says Gary Gilbert, the executive editor. "Then you have an event like 9/11, and you have to pay attention to the things your readers are demanding" - in this case, more news about the broader world.

The point was driven home by a focus group whose members were asked how they would fill an ad-free "A" section of 10 pages. The consensus, says Gilbert, was three pages each for national and international news, and two pages each for local and regional.

Gilbert says the paper needed to satisfy that hunger for non-local news without sacrificing core local coverage, including its popular and successful sports section. After all, readers who say they want more news from overseas may change their minds if they don't read accounts of their town council meetings or high school soccer games. "We had to be very careful," Gilbert says. In the end, the Press didn't cut back in any coverage area, taking a newshole hit instead.

In Lewiston, Maine, the Sun Journal also saw a need for more news from outside the United States. "I'm sure if someone did an audit of our paper and looked at our international coverage, it would be twice as much post-Sept. 11 as before," says Rex Rhoades, its executive editor.

That also was evident in the Sun Journal's editorial page, where more content dealt with national and foreign matters. "The issues were complex and required a lot of background and explanation," says Rhoades, who adds that the reception from readers was strongly positive.

Still, there were limits, especially at smaller papers. "We haven't changed our philosophy much," says Susan Svihlik, executive editor of the Northern Virginia Newspapers, which publishes the Potomac News and the Manassas Journal Messenger outside Washington, D.C., as well as a weekly newspaper. "It was before and remained after that we are local, local, local, and our job is to examine what's going on locally as best we can." (There's no better demonstration of that local philosophy than the front pages of the News and Journal Messenger on the day of the attacks. Both feature photos of the burning Pentagon a few miles from the newsroom, in stark contrast to World Trade Center photos on the front pages of virtually every other newspaper.) But even with the adherence to local news, Svihlik says there have been shifts. A national and foreign page has been added, and the space above the flag on the front page - an area off-limits to all but local news - is now being used to promote significant national and international stories inside.

It is easier to find change at larger papers. For instance, The Boston Globe ombudsman Christine Chinlund says her paper now has three transportation reporters instead of one, two reporters have been assigned to cover security, and another reporter has been shifted from the business staff to cover the Arab world. Chinlund says it is clear that The Globe is running more hard-news stories now and fewer features. But would that change have occurred anyway under The Globe's new editor, Martin Baron? "It's probably safe to say that the news-charged atmosphere of events last fall has made Baron's quest for more substantive stories easier," Chinlund wrote in her column this week. "During a national crisis, in-house advocates for lifestyle stories simply hold less sway."

If the terrorist attacks made it clear that Americans need to know more about the world, they also created a need for better understanding at home.

At The Courier-Journal, executive editor Ivory says the paper has tried hard in the past year to educate readers about cultural differences as a way of preventing conflict. After the attacks, he says, "Probably the biggest change in terms of our approach was to try to better explain the Muslim community here and the differences people have."

In one notable example, the paper brought together a group of Muslims to show the diversity within the religion. "We had Bosnians, Arabs and Palestinians in for a discussion to get their different perspectives," Ivory says. "It was useful for us to gain a greater depth of knowledge about what the Muslim community is all about. That community is huge, and we tried very hard to bring understanding to that."

In a procedural sense, there haven't been any big changes at The Courier-Journal as a result of Sept. 11, Ivory says - no wholesale shifts away from one kind of coverage and toward another. The changes, he says, have been more subtle, including "a different sensibility" about the news and how it is covered.

Looking back at the past 12 months, the paper's efforts "produced a new sense of pride in what we do," he says. "Most if not all papers put their best foot forward when this happened, and in our community the public response was, 'Wow, thank God for The Courier-Journal and what it's trying to tell us.' I think we regained some credibility and the confidence of readers industry wide."

The same sense of satisfaction was felt by the staff of The Times of Trenton, New Jersey. A scrappy paper in a fiercely competitive news market, The Times "threw almost every reporter we had into covering the story," says Brian Malone, its editor. "After all, 67 people from our circulation area died that day." Reporters worked the phones, the train stations, the neighborhoods - all in an effort to get a sense of the attacks' impact on the community. And in the days after Sept. 11, "I don't think we missed a memorial," Malone says.

Just when some semblance of calmness began to return, another huge story broke. Letters containing anthrax began to turn up in Washington, D.C. - many of them bearing return addresses in Trenton. The Times created an "anthrax team" of as many as five reporters to cover the story, which they are still pursuing.

Malone says The Times also shifted emphasis in the months after Sept. 11 toward more national and international coverage, but he adds that it has since shifted back. "We have a strong bias toward local news. That's our franchise," he says.

What hasn't changed is the paper's attitude. "I told the staff a week into our 9/11 coverage that we were covering a war, and that that's how we should approach the coverage. That's still the feeling today."

As the reality of the attacks set in on Sept. 11, Peoria's Jack Brimeyer recalls thinking about journalists who witnessed other seminal events in the nation's history. "In that fleeting instant, I thought about the editors who had lived during the attack on Pearl Harbor," he says.

A year later, Brimeyer notes subtle changes in his paper. "We have, I think, increased coverage of international news and probably coverage of national government, perhaps by cutting down on other national news," he says. And, like The Courier-Journal, the Journal Star has tried to encourage cultural understanding in its reporting, a task made even more important by the fact that Peoria has a large Lebanese-American community.

Beyond that, Brimeyer believes Sept. 11 changed the men and women who produce the Journal Star every day. Working alongside them for 18 consecutive days in the wake of the attacks, Brimeyer says he vividly remembers "worrying about the emotional health of my staff. These were people who wanted to work 18 hours a day. I remember saying to myself, internally, that I had to allow myself time to cry, and I hope a lot of newsrooms are now realizing the need to do that."

Such sensitivity - to each other and to the community - "makes us better journalists," Brimeyer says, "and that's going to stay with all of us."

As will one other thing. "Every September for the rest of our professional lives, we'll have meetings to talk about the same thing," he says. "Our memorial editions."