By Paul Greeley

NOTE: This is from Stacey Woelfel’s Substack column, The Last Editor by Stacey Woelfel.

Stacey Woelfel spent 35 years on the faculty of the Missouri School of Journalism.

And for 24 years, he was the news director for KOMU, the University of Missouri-owned NBC affiliate for central Missouri.

“I’ve been a professional journalist since 1981, a college-level educator since 1986 and someone with an opinion I always think someone else wants to hear since 1959.

These are my reflections, musings and rants on the state of journalism today.”

News Blues has posted many of Woelfel’s Substack columns over the past few years.

Every Journalist of a Certain Age Has a 9/11 Story

By Stacey Woelfel

As we look back 25 years, my memories are of student journalists rising to a once-in-a-lifetime challenge.

My September 11, 2001 started in the classroom. I was the faculty news director at KOMU-TV at that time and my teaching duties included Broadcast 3, our intermediate reporting class which, through its labs, provided general assignment reporters for the TV and radio newsrooms.

The class also had a lecture component that met once a week on Tuesday mornings at 8 am. I arrived in the classroom about 7:50 am Central Time to get everything plugged in and ready. My colleague Greeley Kyle was already on campus and popped his head into the classroom to let me know that a plane had just hit the World Trade Center and that it might be worth watching in class. This being a reporting class, I agreed and as the students filed in, I told them we’d be delaying what was on the syllabus for that day in order to see how NBC News reported this huge breaking news story.

We all believed we were watching the coverage of a spectacular aviation accident—that is until three minutes into class when the second plane hit. We all knew then it was no accident. I quickly found our department chair, Kent Collins, had him take over class and I headed to the newsroom to start what I knew would be a very long day.

It’s worth noting that I was one of very few television news directors in his newsroom that day.

The annual Radio-Television News Directors Association (now called the Radio Television Digital News Association) convention was set to start in Nashville on Sept. 12 and many news directors were already in Music City when the attacks happened.

Since Nashville is relatively close to Columbia, I had made plans to drive there on Wednesday, leaving me in my newsroom for that fated Tuesday. Those news managers already in Nashville or in mid-flight on their way there were stranded once air traffic shut down.

Their stories of trying to get home for the biggest story of the new millennium are all worth hearing directly from the people who lived them.

I arrived in the newsroom about 8:25 and immediately went to work gathering as many reporters and producers as I could.

The one benefit our small station always has is person power. With approximately 75 student journalists at our disposal for a big story, we could always outgun the competition with more feet on the street.

We dispatched the reporters we already had in-house to the state capitol (just 25 miles way), to vital law enforcement centers, to Missouri’s two military bases, to both our on-campus nuclear reactor and the large nuclear power plant to our east and to the airport. As those reporters made their ways to those locations, we got on the phones looking to find local connections to the east coast attacks that had already taken place.

Both our leg work and phone work turned up very little that rivaled what was going on in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

Yes, the state was preparing for possible attacks at its vital centers, but there was no evidence that threat was real. State leaders gathered to react and to inform the public, but again, there wasn’t much locally to say. Likewise, we had difficulty finding anyone locally who had direct connections to any of the flights, the World Trade Center or the Pentagon. While we eventually found a few people who had concerns about loved ones near the attack areas, all were found to be alive and well once relatives could get through by phone.

Through most of the day, we stayed with NBC News coverage on the air.

This was in the pre-streaming days, so any big story worth covering live was covered on air.

NBC was providing a lot of detailed reporting on the attacks and their aftermath, while we weren’t finding anything exceptionally important to report locally.

We forewent our noon newscast to stay with NBC all afternoon.

Our next regularly schedule newscast was at 5:00 pm and we did break away from the network for 30 minutes to air that newscast.

Even though we had spent the day reporting only to find that Missouri was largely unaffected by the events on the East Coast, I felt it was important to let people know that. We aired another local newscast at 6:00 pm and ran that one for a full hour, pre-empting Wheel of Fortune before we returned to the network at 7:00 pm Central Time.

While Missouri ended up being a bit of a backwater when it came to important stories coming out of 9/11, we did have one local story upon which we could focus.

A team of firefighters and rescue workers from a local fire district were deployed to New York to help with efforts at the World Trade Center. Three student reporters volunteered to go to New York to cover this team and work and to find other stories while there.

They couldn’t fly there, of course, so we piled them into a car and sent them on their way late Tuesday night. They drove through the night, sleeping briefly in West Virginia if I remember correctly, getting to New York in just a day’s time.

They found the local unit and gave us good coverage of its recovery efforts, as well as finding a firefighter memorial that just happened to be in New York at the time of the attacks awaiting transport to be set up in central Missouri.

The stories they did were like nothing the competition could come up with, putting our local coverage of this major event way out in front.

After about 60 hours of very hard work and excellent coverage from our massive team of journalists, we took a moment one evening to reflect on what had happened.

That Thursday night, I invited everyone to a local pizza joint to unwind and share their feelings about all we had been through.

Today, we’re used to looking after the mental health of our journalists. Back then, we usually wouldn’t give all the stress they were under a second thought. I don’t remember exactly what drove us to have this informal session, but I’m glad we did.

There were some tears, mostly shed over the lives lost. But there were some laughs as well. I distinctly recall one student forlornly telling us that Sept. 11 is her birthday and that she will forever be stuck with its anniversary landing on her big day. We wanted to feel sad for her, but she’s the one who started laughing first, getting all of us to let off some emotion that night.

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Looking back now, 25 years later, my lasting memory of the events of that dark week is how eager and tireless my young journalists were tackling this momentous story. They knew, even as fledgling reporters just entering the field, that this would be one of the biggest stories of their careers. They showed up in the newsroom without being asked, came in ready to work nonstop until the job was done and never complained once about the grueling workload and endless shifts. I would put the work they did that week up against anyone in any size market across the country. They understood the 9/11 story was about lives lost and lives changed by a horrific event. They never stopped looking for the people who felt that impact the most and never stopped thinking about what they could do to help a stunned audience understand what had happened. They were selfless in the way they threw themselves into the work, never complaining and never shirking the responsibility that had been thrust upon them.

This recollection has—perhaps unexpectedly—a sequel. Because just two weeks after the breaking news of 9/11, a controversy stemming from its coverage would develop—one with me and my newsroom right at the center of it. The impact of that crisis on me, my newsroom and journalism in general is coming in this space next week.

Paul Greeley is the manager and a writer for News Blues.

He can be reached at Paul@NewsBlues.com or 817-578-6324.