From the professionals: CNN

Newspaper Research Journal, Winter 2003 by Sylvester, Judith, Huffman, Suzanne

In some ways, Rose Arce was uniquely qualified to cover the events of Sept. 11.

As a WCBS-TV reporter, she had covered the World Trade Center bombing on Feb. 26, 1993. She had shared a Pulitzer Prize with colleagues for a subway crash story she had covered for New York Newsday. She covered plane crashes and other disasters there.

Rose, a CNN producer, just wanted to spend a few minutes enjoying a beautiful, sunny day in New York City before running over to her local polling center to cast her vote in the primary mayoral race. "I was going to vote and then cover the election. I was told I would be working a late shift," she said.

But first, she went to get coffee at a deli across the street. "It was a really beautiful day, just a gorgeous day. Usually by Sept. 11 it's gray already." After she got her coffee, she heard on NPR radio that something happened at the World Trade Center. "It sounded ominous. I immediately flipped on my cell phone and called the office. I said, 'I heard about the World Trade Center. Where do you want me to go because I'm going to start running downtown?' Whoever answered the phone said, 'Just go, go, go and call us when you get there.'"

Rose lives near Horatio and Washington, which make a straight line down to the Trade Center. "I started running south, and people were just standing in the street, looking up. I got about two blocks and could see the building on fire." An African-American woman, who Rose said she would never forget, came by in a black Lexus. She knocked on her window and flashed the press ID hanging around her neck. "I said, 'Hey, I'm with CNN. Please give a ride downtown.' I jumped into her car, and she took me down a few blocks from the Trade Center," she said.

Her cell phone had stopped working, so she ducked into a deli to use the phone to call CNN. Then, she started running farther south with a swarm of people coming at her. "It was like a weird movie. People were running in business suits, all with cell phones trying to talk as they were running. I was running against the traffic. My intention was to get inside the North Tower because that is what I did in 1993. Then there was this hum, like when the subway is passing underneath me, except that it was in the air."

As she was being pummeled by people running past her, she saw a little girl nearby who was screaming, "Daddy, Daddy! They are doing it on purpose!" First, there was a loud sound, and then a plane came out of nowhere and "just slammed into the building." She still had her cell phone in her hand and was frantically trying to dial CNN. But, she just kept getting a busy signal.

She ran across the street to an apartment building where a woman was standing. "Do you live here?" Rose asked her. "She said her husband, Jim, was on the top floor, so I ran up the stairs and knocked on his door." She told him she was from CNN and that she had seen his wife downstairs and wanted to come into his apartment. "He said 'yeah, yeah, yeah, come in,'" she said. "People were unbelievably helpful that day. Everyone was like 'the world is going to end, what do I care if you come into my apartment?'" Jim turned out to be a photographer who takes children's pictures. "I've seen him a few times," Rose said. "He's a real sweetheart."

Rose described the apartment as "a construction site because they were redoing the floors." Several other people were coming in and out of the apartment, but they were a blur to Rose.

"We turned on the television set. Jim had one of those carry-around phones and the battery was dying, so I had to keep running to the back room where I couldn't see and put it on speaker phones so I could call in to CNN to give them reports of what I was seeing," she said.

As CNN showed live pictures of the Towers smoking in the distance, Rose described what she was witnessing. She could either stay where she had a phone or try to get closer to the scene. "I was frantic to get inside the building. I was only two or three blocks away. But, I couldn't because my phone wasn't working. So, I stayed at this guy's phone. When I finally got through to Atlanta, they were so panicked. They would suddenly throw me on air again with the anchor. I kept stretching the phone cord and saying, 'You won't believe what I'm looking at.'"

Normally, anchors would be asking questions. But, not this time. "There were no questions," Rose said. "I would just keep talking and there was silence on the other end. It was like they couldn't believe what I was saying."

Rose had with her a two-way pager that she rarely used because it wasn't very reliable. But suddenly it started going off. "People were paging me, and they were saying, 'Are you okay?' 'Have you heard anything?' 'Do you know about the building?'"

In between her phone calls to CNN to get on the air, she called her cell phone. "I was hoping it would ring. I didn't know if something was wrong with it or the Tower. I could get into my voice mailbox, but I couldn't get the phone to work. I just kept thinking that if I could get my phone to work, I could go downtown."