How the WSJ operated on Sept. 11

Roy J. Harris Jr. writes for The Poynter Institute about Dean Rotbart’s book on how The Wall Street Journal covered the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks after its main office become inoperable due to the World Trade Center disaster.

Harris writes. “Rotbart’s retelling also hit me personally because of the many Journal friends I have from my own 24-year career at the paper, until 1995, working in bureaus outside New York. And also because I myself ventured down from Boston the next day by car, with my home-delivered copy of the Sept. 12 Journal edition in hand, to be with my wife, who had been visiting her son in Manhattan at the time.

“The two chapters excerpted here — ‘Project 2002’ and ‘If Not Today, When?’ — are from the second section of ‘September Twelfth.’ They focus on experiences of several Journal staffers who were central to the paper’s ability to publish such an extraordinary product. ( Rotbart is also working on a biography of one of them: Paul Steiger, the Journal’s managing editor at the time of the 9/11 attacks. Steiger later became ProPublica’s founding editor.)

“In an author’s note prepared for ‘September Twelfth,’ Rotbart describes his use of original interviews, as well as government reports, books and articles about 9/11, along with ‘hundreds of never-published contemporaneous internal emails and memos, as well as personal diaries.’ Noting the inconsistencies in many of these accounts, he says: ‘Rather than offering alternate depictions, I crafted a chronicle that I believe represents the most faithful retelling of what occurred, albeit one that is filtered through the prism of human imperfection.'”

Read more here.