Sarah asks David about how he reported and organized the sweeping narrative just days after it occurred. They discuss the challenge today’s journalists encounter reporting on a relentless and dangerous pandemic, and how today’s work is “exponentially harder."
Four days after September 11, 2001, David wrote an epic article for the Sunday Washington Post. The 12,000-word story, pulling from his own reporting and memos from a superb team of Post reporters, took the reader from the ordinary promise of a crisp September morning into the chaotic and heart-wrenching details of an unfolding tragedy—with precise accounts from inside the planes, the twin towers, the pentagon and air traffic control towers, along with eye-witnesses in lower Manhattan and the living rooms of anxious relatives across the country. Nearly twenty years later, the story is an enduring memorial to the human consequences of that unforgettable day’s historic and tragic events. Sarah asks David about how he reported and organized the sweeping narrative just days after it occurred. They discuss the challenge today’s journalists encounter reporting on a relentless and dangerous pandemic, and how today’s work is “exponentially harder.”