Workplace memory of 911
Anna Kenny called it. She was always on the ball. A young sub-editor training on new technology in the basement of the old Irish Times building in Dublin, she said to those with her in the room, “Someone’s flown in to the Twin Towers in New York.” What? There were about 10 of us, led by me, getting familiar with the new direct-publishing technology that the flagship Irish broadsheet was adopting, learning new tricks. It was a Tuesday afternoon in September, a mild day. When Anna commented, it took a while to compute. What was that about? I said, “Do you mean, like that guy Mathias Rust in Moscow?” Rust was the German teenager who, as a late Cold War stunt, had flown a single-engine Cessna into Red Square in 1987. It was strange, and we were busy, so I turned back to what we were doing, puzzling over the future. But then Anna, legitimately reading news sites to use stories in our exercises, said: “There’s another one.” And we saw the first images. It’s a strange feeling, your ...