Looking back: The Monitor's coverage of 9/11

Ten years ago, The Monitor had recently moved into a renovated newsroom on the second floor of the venerable Christian Science Publishing Society in Boston. It featured new, modular desks, carpeting instead of linoleum, and many large TV monitors hung from the ceiling. They were tuned to various network and cable channels, but with the sound turned off, normally. So the first indication of a crisis on 9/11 was a chilling silent image of smoke billowing from the North Tower of the World Trade Center, an image that spread from screen to screen across the newsroom. When the second plane hit, 17 minutes after the first, it was clear that the United States was under attack.

We had four hours till deadline that day. Four hours in which to try to make sense of what had just happened. Reporters, editors, photographers, editorial writers, columnists, feature writers, even editors and writers of the religious article that appears in the Monitor daily, sprang into action. It was the beginning of days, weeks, and months of reporting and analysis of that incident and its aftermath that would follow.

The list below represents some of the most significant reporting and writing we did that day and on subsequent days. The 9/11 stories and images are The Monitor's first draft of the history of that moment. Like most first drafts, some could do with some revising now. But give credit to the swiftness with which they had to be written -- especially those produced that first day and week -- and the decades (if not centuries) of accumulated wisdom, knowledge, and expertise they represent on the part of a staff that worked around the clock to bring them to you.