From the professionals: CNN

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

Rose said that everybody coming from the area was saying that everyone was dead. "There was just no rescue operation. There was nothing but fire and smoke. The debris was awful-little pieces of everything you can imagine in a building. If you just took people and desks and computers and drywall and porcelain and just put it through a shredder, it would all come back out as little, tiny pieces. People's business cards, sticky pads, glasses, photos on their desks, all charred and chopped up. And the closer you got blood. It was just awful."

Rose and her cameraman, carrying a beta cam, kept trying to get closer. "Although people think of the World Trade Center as two tall buildings, it is really a complex, with several big buildings that don't look big compared to the Twin Towers. Those buildings were completely on fire, crushed and in danger of collapsing. We got very close to those. At that point, I think I was more in a state of shock than I realized until much afterwards. Once or twice my cameraman grabbed me and said, 'Hey, Rose, we've got to get out.' I was standing there trying to work. And things were not looking good around us."

Television news is driven by the technology, but Rose says they weren't focused on that. "At that point, I gathered that we had a lot of material that other people didn't have. Swirling in my head was, 'How do we get the tape back?' 'What do they know?' 'What's missing here?' When I called the office, there was incredible activity there, but I felt so disconnected from it. They didn't even know where to start with this stuff. One of the beautiful things about CNN is that they are very good at covering disasters and breaking news and there's a certain calm to it all. But, that day, the thing you kept hearing was 'Give us more! Give us more! Tell us everything you know!' There was an unending stream of things that needed to be gathered. Questions that needed to be answered."

In her quest for a good view of the scene, Rose went onto the balcony of a man who had been celebrating his son's first birthday. His terrace overlooked the Twin Towers. "We talked about it for a while as he held his little boy. It was just so odd. It was like being at Pearl Harbor- just a weird feeling. We were watching the buildings burning and the Twin Towers were gone. I asked him how he was going to explain this to his son." They projected 30 years into the future when he would tell people that during his first birthday party, terrorists attacked New York City.

Rose went back to the office, bringing back tape. She did a story about what she had seen. After midnight when she finished, she asked for a cameraman and went back down to Ground Zero. "We went to a huge parking lot that was next to the North Tower. It was very chaotic that first day because they were hoping they were going to rescue someone. They were still waiting to get back in because the fire and debris were so enormous that they couldn't get access to the building. There was very little security. There were firefighters and police who were trying to shut off streets, but there was such pandemonium that we just walked right through it," she said.