Inside Canadian newsrooms' triumphs — and regrets — while covering the 9/11 attacks

TORONTO — Like every other journalist working in a Canadian newsroom on Sept. 11, 2001, Michelle Shephard recalls the moment she learned a plane had struck the World Trade Center in New York City. Then a crime reporter at the Toronto Star, she barely stopped to grab her passport and a notebook before rushing to the airport, which had already grounded flights and switched off television screens.

Shephard quickly switched gears and jumped into a car headed for New York with other Star reporters, joining scores of other journalists and volunteers hustling toward Ground Zero as thousands were trying to escape it. Reporting on the 9/11 attacks required an extraordinary collective effort at a time when verifiable facts and explanations were scarce and the world was gripped with fear. The attacks also pushed journalists to their physical and emotional limits, exposing the risks of reporting on traumatic events.

Twenty-five years later, prominent journalists reflected on their triumphs and regrets in covering 9/11, and how newsroom decisions shaped Canadians’ understanding of the events that changed global security and international politics. REPORTING FROM A TRAUMATIZED CITY During their “crazy fast” drive to New York, Shephard and her colleagues got lucky. She said her laminated Toronto Star press pass “looked like it was made in someone’s basement,” but it was enough for one official to let them into a lane marked for emergency responders.

They arrived in the eerily quiet city that night and the sight of a firefighter slumped over on the ground, weary after digging for bodies in the rubble, stopped Shephard in her tracks. Other details from the scene are still seared in her mind a quarter-century later. The mountain of papers that fell in a blizzard from the collapsed office towers, which Shephard initially mistook for a snowbank.

Thousands of eyes staring out from posters of missing people plastered across Manhattan. The repulsive, metallic smell hanging in the air. “It was an entire city that was traumatized,” Shephard said in a recent interview.

Every other aspect of her life quickly fell by the wayside. Shephard’s husband, fellow Star reporter Jim Rankin, had rushed off to Boston, where the flights that crashed into the towers originated. The pair realized within a few hours that in the chaos, neither had made plans for someone to look after their new kitten…