Wednesday, October 3, 2001

Then & Now
A former Skiff editor in chief takes time to reflect on the past weeks and his time as editor in spring 2000
Joaquin Herrera is a designer at the San Antonio Express-News.

On Sept. 11, journalists across the country went into crisis mode. They did not have time to think about the tragic events that were unfolding around them. They had no time to cry. They had no time to face the frightening situation in our country. They just did their job — they brought information to a society that wanted to know “why?”

When hijacked airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in rural Pennsylvania, journalists were faced with a catastrophe no one wants to cover. As a student at TCU a few years ago, I certainly never thought I would have to be a part of a tragedy like this either.

In the spring 2000 semester, I was a graduating senior at TCU. With a job lined up at the San Antonio Express-News, I was ready to live my life outside academia. I entered college knowing that journalism was my calling, and I felt, at the time, that I was fully capable of handling any situation I would be faced with.

When I was at TCU, the TCU Daily Skiff staff had already gone through major training in covering a catastrophe. In the fall 2000 semester, a shooting at Wedgwood Baptist Church showed us that covering a tragedy is not easy.

Kim Jones, a TCU alumna who served the church as a youth group leader, was one of those killed. Covering the shooting would test our ability to be sensitive to family and church members. It would drill us on what is appropriate to report.

Although I think we effectively covered that event, I had hoped we would not be faced with something like that again. But during the next semester, on March 28, 2000, an F-2 tornado missed our campus and hit downtown Fort Worth, killing four people and injuring several others.

This time, we would be covering a tragedy while risking our own lives. When word spread of the bad weather, we immediately sprung to action. While we were making assignments and decisions, the electricity in the newsroom went out. We immediately evacuated part of the newsroom while continuing to send out people. A photographer and a reporter headed for downtown Fort Worth with a camera and a reporter’s notebook filled with questions. Some reporters headed for the main campus residence halls, while others stayed behind and waited for the building to regain electricity and for our computers to get back online. While reporters probed the feelings of those in dormitory basements, designers and editors back in the newsroom were deciding how to present our information.

Our campus was untouched and hall directors and resident assistants took all the right steps to ensure the safety of students. In downtown Fort Worth, however, lives were lost and many people were hurt, not to mention the millions of dollars in damage caused by the tornado in the area. The next day, we found out two TCU students had helped to rescue a man trapped in some of the rubble. Of course we reported it, as well as giving our readers a visual documentation of the damage.

Events like these are certainly tragic. When you step back and think about it, you wonder why people want to be a part of a tragedy like this. I ask myself the same questions daily. Why do journalists take on this role? Why did we want photos of the destroyed buildings in downtown Fort Worth? Why did we try to call the brother of Kim Jones after she was killed in the shooting at Wedgwood Baptist Church? Why do we stick microphones in people’s faces as they watch two 110-story buildings crumble to the ground? Why do we take photographs of people falling to their deaths from the burning buildings? And why do we watch tragedy shown over and over again on television? I really don’t know the answers to my own questions. But I do know that when tragedy struck America on Sept. 11, I couldn’t get myself to stop watching the news — or asking myself “why?”

Joaquin Herrera is a designer at the San Antonio Express-News.
He may be contacted at (jherrera@express-news.net).