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         A Newsroom Challenged I have seen reporters crying at their telephones, even as they summoned the professional discipline to keep reporting, keep writing until the task was done. They were inspired and sometimes driven by an awareness of what these pieces had come to mean to the grieving families and friends and to that larger community of Americans who mourned for all the World Trade Center victims, strangers to them or not, just as in an earlier day their parents mourned for the dead of Pearl Harbor. —New York Times executive editor Howell Raines, on the preparation of “Portraits of Grief” Uefore work one morning, Gerald Boyd was relaxing in the barber chair. Then the world changed. The haircut was in preparation for a special dinner party that night. Just five days into his new job as managing editor of the New York Times, Boyd would be joining new editorial page editor Gail Collins and executive editor Howell Raines at the home of publisher Arthur Sulzberger. It was also primary election day—a nice little exercise for a Metro desk that had the extraordinary talent of the Times. But certainly, there seemed to be nothing on the horizon that warm late-summer morning to jeopardize dinner at the publisher’s. The barber was Haitian and spoke French and Creole, and little English. Boyd liked it that way. “We didn’t have to engage in conversations, and he could do his business without talking about world affairs,” he said. To catch a breeze, the shop’s door was open. “Someone walked in and yelled to the barber, ‘Have you heard about the plane that crashed into the Twin Towers?’” The words were hardly spoken—Boyd leapt from under the scissors. “I ran out  with the smock still on, fishing money out for him, saying, I have to go. He didn’t understand what I was saying. He said he wasn’t finished.” The barber shop was sixty-five blocks north of Times Square, where the newsroom was in desperate need of its new managing editor. Boyd tried the subway. No service. There was a “police action at the World Trade Center,” the announcement said. He stopped a gypsy cab willing to make the trip. His fifty dollars and his constant urging for the driver to ignore the speed limit—“If you get a ticket, I’ll pay,” Boyd shouted—paid off. In fifteen minutes he was in the office. On the newsroom television, he was able to watch early film of the second plane hitting, eighteen minutes after the first strike. The Culture Kicks In An outsider looking at the job ahead for Boyd, Raines, and other New York Times “masthead editors” might see September  as a nearly uncoverable local, national , and global story. But Boyd, who for eight years had served as assistant managing editor and then deputy managing editor before assuming the managing editorship the prior week, saw a ritual play out that was no less amazing because it was expected. At least, it was expected at the Times. “The culture of the New York Times kicks in, and that culture is that certain things become automatic,” he said. The “A-book”—the paper’s first section—was immediately opened up, its ads cleared out. That happened on any huge story: the Berlin Wall coming down, the first Gulf War, the earlier,  attack on the World Trade Center. The A-book had been opened a dozen times since Boyd had been in management. Planning his staff’s day under such pressure, his mind adjusted with each new shock. “As we watched the tube it was soon clear that we were dealing with an incredible story. But what struck me most about it—and it’s kind of strange—was when I learned that Air Force One had been zigzagging.” Having been a White House correspondent, he knew all that was done to keep the president’s plane insulated from the world outside. “I always felt extremely safe, and if they were taking these extreme measures, it made it even more frightening.” Boyd made two decisions within minutes. One was to pull all the staff that had been assigned to cover the election—essentially everyone on the Metro staff—and recapture the space in the paper that was dedicated to the primary. It was a bit of a gamble, but paid off quickly when the crush of events forced the vote’s cancellation . (“When I made the call I didn...

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