10.31.11
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Picking the right tool for the journalism job

If you’re not familiar with the monthly Carnival of Journalism, it’s worth knowing about because it plugs you into a conversation amongst other journalists. The topic for October’s Carnival was about how to choose the digital tools and platforms. (I’m just getting in under the wire, but my travel schedule and moving flat took up more time than we actually had.)

Dave Cohn aka digidave asked:

How do you decide to dedicate time to a new tool/platform/gadget? What is the process you go through mentally? And then later – how do you convince others to go through that process? And, last: How do you ensure that the tools you do adopt are used once the “newness” factor fades?

This really struck a cord with me. My last position at The Guardian was digital research editor. Don’t worry if you need an explanation of what the role was so did most of my colleagues, and I’m not entirely sure that we had the working definition hammered out before I left. Operationally, I moved from desk to desk on a several month basis and helped that desk with their digital projects. For instance, my last desk was politics to help them as they prepared for 2010 UK general election. My job was also to keep abreast of new digital developments and see how we could use them for The Guardian’s award-winning journalism.

Although the job was to be aware of digital tools and platforms, I always approached it in terms of editorial challenges that I needed to meet. The challenge might be to find simple mapping services that journalists could use without having to call on developers, whose time was in great demand, or it might be simple tools to analyse and visualise data. I almost always started out from the point of view of the editorial problem we were trying to solve rather than the tool or platform. Sure, sometimes when a platform got a lot of traction, I would try it out to see how we could engage the audience using that platform, but even then, I looked at things from the point of view of how what they could do for our journalists and our audience. Increasingly, as the cuts took hold at The Guardian, I also thought about the business side of the tools.

Simply put, I asked of tools and platforms:

  • Does it make a journalists job faster and easier?
  • Does it help us make money or save money?
  • Does it help bring audiences to our journalism or our journalism to audiences?
  • Does it allow us to tell stories better, more easily or more engagingly?
  • Does it build audience loyalty and keep people engaged with our journalism longer?

It’s a very similar checklist to Jack Lail’s. As he says, if the tools don’t meet strategic goals, “Learn to say “no” to the rest”. These were my criteria, my personal strategic goals, but it’s more important that the organisation has those goals in mind rather than a particular set of goals. For the next full-time job that I take (and I am starting to look for a more permanent home), I’m more than open to a different set of goals, but I think it’s important for organisations to have a set of criteria.

Moreover, we need metrics. We need to measure against these goals.

My former colleague at the BBC, Alf Hermida, flagged up the Forrester Research’s POST methodology to evaluate new technology. Broadly Alf says, and I agree:

The starting point for this discussion is the public, not the tools. Talking about tools is the last thing we should be doing.

I also think that sometimes it’s about the journalists, helping us cope with all of the demands of the job as staffs shrink. However, very few people in this world use a tool just to use a tool. They use a tool because it’s the best way to solve a problem or achieve a goal. It’s important to know all of the digital tools you can bring to bear on modern journalism problems, but it’s important to keep the goal in mind, lest we become tools of our tools.

10.28.11
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When commenting systems go bad

Just recently, one of my favourite blogs moved a new home on Wired and, in the process, moved to the Disqus commenting system. I’ve sat in many meetings where Disqus has been named as the desired commenting system. I have often found myself on the fence, preferring, say, the built-in WordPress commenting system over any third party system, but still understanding that the issues with managing very high volumes of comments can encourage companies to outsource them. Until recently, though, I hadn’t had any real in-depth experience of using Disqus as a commenter.

I have now. And I have discovered that Disqus kills conversation and frustrates users.

The problems with Disqus surprise me, because they’ve been around a while and I would have expected them to understand how online discussions actually work, and adjust their tool to facilitate conversation. Instead, Disqus quashes conversation. Here are the issues, and possibly a few solutions:

Comment display is broken
There has long been a debate in commenting circles about whether threaded comments or flat comments are best. The truth is, neither are better than the other, both have their strengths and weaknesses. But Disqus, or at least the installations of it that I have recently seen, do not provide an option to view comments in a flat, strictly chronological or reverse-chrono order.

When you have a rich and fast-moving conversation in blog comments, threading kills it because it is nigh-on impossible to know where the new comments are in the various threads. An option to show comments in a flat view would allow users to quickly see which comments are most recent. We are smart enough to thread the conversations we’ve read already in our memories, but wading through threads in order to find the one new comment is a chore no one will bother with.

This means Disqus kills conversation in big, complexly-threaded discussions.

Being able to easily switch between views would be even better, so that you can find the newest comments, but then switch to see them in context of their threads.

Comment paging is broken
If there’s one thing that drives me nuts about Disqus it’s that there is no “view all” option. On my favourite blog, I have to page through comments in chunks of 40 at a time and, once the thread gets over 80, it becomes very tedious on page reload to have to re-page through to the newest comments if I want to actually see them in reverse-chrono order. My only option is to then view them newest-first, which means I have to then find the join, which is again a pain in the arse, especially if when I last looked there were 100 comments, and now there are 200.

I recently saw a blog post with 900 comments, which were only accessible in pages of 10. If anyone thinks that people are going to bother to page through all those comments, ten at a time, they need a reality check. It’s already hard enough to get people to read comments before they write their own, but this just encourages drive-by commenting, which is very bad for conversation and community-building.

Disqus needs to have a “view all” option. I don’t care if it takes a minute or two to load, I just want everything, on one page, so that I can scan it at speed to pick out the comments I care about.

Other issues:
Login kills comments. On the train into London this morning I wrote a comment, then realised that I wasn’t logged in. I logged in with Google, as I usually do, and Disqus threw away my comment. WTF? Really? That’s how you treat logging in?

Newest first is weird: Newest first also does really weird stuff with within-thread threading which I haven’t get got my head round, but it bloody annoys me.

Page refresh breaks flow: On a lot of commenting systems, if I refresh the page in order to fetch new comments, the browser will remember where I am on the page and all I need to do to continue reading is, well, continue reading. Not with Disqus. Refreshing the page essentially resets Disqus, meaning that I have to re-page through everything and search for my place. A comment bookmarking system might help with this, or they could just offer a persistent single page view.

Just say No to Disqus
I have to say, I would now actively militate against clients using Disqus if they have any desire to create conversation and community. Disqus frustrates passionate readers, drives away interested but less committed readers, and makes genuine conversation difficult or impossible. It seems to be a great system for collecting comments to be ignored, but it’s terrible if you actually care about your comments or your commenters.

Given that Disqus has been around since 2007, the fact that it hasn’t cracked comment display yet is shocking to me. I honestly thought they of all people would have nailed it. Quite the opposite, in fact: Their design can only be described as user-surly.

10.18.11
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Scientists should not be given the right to fact check the press

Last week, Dr Petroc Sumner, Dr Frederic Boy and Dr Chris Chambers, all from the School of Psychology at Cardiff University, argued in the Guardian that “Scientists should be allowed to check stories on their work before publication”. The only sensible and rational response to that is “No, they should not.”

Sumner, Boy and Chambers argue that scientists should be given veto because:

  1. Scientific papers are peer reviewed so have already been scrutinised by independent eyes, implying that journalists therefore don’t need to be themselves independent when reporting such papers.
  2. There are no political parties in science, ergo there can be no ‘conspiracies’
  3. Scientists have nothing to gain and a lot to loose from exaggerated claims in the press
  4. It’s the only way to ensure accuracy

What utter tosh.

There is no doubt at all that quite a bit of science journalism is appalling, riven by inaccuracies, biases and sometimes just complete twaddle. You only have to read Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science to see what a mess journalists get themselves into. The problem is that Sumner, Boy and Chambers are engaging in special pleading on the basis of four flawed premises:

Firstly, scientific papers may well get peer reviewed, but that doesn’t mean that they are correct, it simply means that they have been looked at by some other scientists who either can’t find or won’t find fault. Papers get retracted when problems come to light later on, so peer review is not a guarantee that a paper is correct.

Secondly, the idea that there are no lines to toe in science is utter bunkum. There may not be political parties but there certainly are scientific orthodoxies, and that means lines to toe. The fact that something has become orthodoxy does not, in and of itself, guarantee that it is correct. Prevailing theories do get overturned when new evidence comes to light and, whilst those who make extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence to back them up, science has a rich history of exactly that.

Point three only needs to be answered with one word: Ego.

And point four shows a spectacular misunderstanding of the journalistic process and the factors that cause errors and misinformation to propagate. Let’s take a quick look at some of these (I’m sure there are more, please do add them in the comments!):

  1. Good journalists on tight deadlines have little time and few resources to do comprehensive reading and research on a story, so mistakes,  misunderstandings and inaccuracies can easily creep in to the work even of the most dedicated.
  2. University and research institution press releases, and sometimes even scientists themselves, can be misleading. Sometimes those inaccuracies are picked up by the journalist, sometimes they make it through to press.
  3. Some hacks and editors don’t actually give a shit whether something is accurate, they simply want a shocking or outrageous story that they think will get them lots of readers.
  4. Some hacks have financial relationships with the companies whose “science” they are writing about, destroying any vestiges of impartiality they might once have claimed.

Which of these scenarios would actually be helped by adding an extra layer of “fact checking” by scientists? In the first case, the journalist doesn’t have time/resource so the fact checking just isn’t going to happen. In the second, the fact checking would be undermined by the very people doing it as they would only propagate their own inaccuracies. And again, in the third and fourth scenarios, facts are irrelevant, so why would they get checked?

There are things that would help, however:

  1. Additional time and resources for science journalism and appropriate training . This is frankly never going to come from the news organisations themselves because they are all struggling to survive and science is seen all too often as a minority sport. It might be that a well-respected science communications charity or NGO could fund training for journalists wanting to cover science, e.g. in how to interpret papers and how to understand statistics. They would also need to fund the journalist’s actual work, ensuring that they had the time and resources required to do a good job.
  2. News organisations need to take complaints about inaccuracies more seriously. Even the so-called quality newspapers don’t always pay any attention to readers who point out problems in science stories. Often, then will officially stand by the most egregious bullshit because they’d rather not have to deal with the fact that they got it wrong.
  3. Some sort of standards commission with real power should hold all news organisations to account, forcing them to make corrections and imposing significant fines for the most egregious misbehaviour. I’d say “Maybe the PCC could do this sort of thing”, but they’re a spineless, toothless waste of time. If there was any censure at all of misinformation in the media, some of which is actively harmful to the reader’s health, maybe this conversation wouldn’t be dragging on and on for years, as it actually is.
  4. Oh, and here’s an innovative one: Maybe university press departments should stop sexing up press releases, liaise more tightly with their own scientists to get their facts right, and provide any relevant photos, graphs, graphics and data in reusable formats with a clear and concise explanation of what they illustrate. Of the press releases covering scientific topics that I’ve had to work from, none gave me even half of what I needed.
  5. Scientists should be responsive to press enquiries, and should prepare FAQs, lists of relevant links and re-usable quotes about their research up front. Their papers should be available, along with a proper bio and even photos, just in case. Whilst most of the scientists I’ve dealt with have been very responsive, none have sent me a link to a website with background info and relevant resources on it that I could use to quickly bring myself up to speed before asking them specific question. It would have saved everyone’s time if they had done that. (Plus it’d be a great thing for me to link to in my articles!)

Science journalism isn’t actually a collaboration between scientist and journalist, it’s a process of interpretation which depends on both sides being independent of the other.

So what would happen if Sumner, Boy and Chambers got their wish?

Well, where there’s orthodoxy there’s the opportunity for new ideas and voices to be suppressed when they come into conflict with established bodies. Although science is supposed to be immune to this, it does sometimes – thankfully rarely – happen. If there are no independent science journalists, there’s no opportunity for new voices and evidence to be heard.

When scientists get it wrong, which they do, we need science journalists like Goldacre need to be able to criticise their methodologies, assumptions and conclusions free from interference. If Goldacre had to pass everything he wrote past the people he was writing about, he would get almost nothing published.

In short, we would see the wholesale marginalisation of dissent, and not just dissent from the journalist, but from opposing scientific voices too. It would be, in short, a disaster for science and science communication.

(Hat tip: Glyn Mottershead.)

10.17.11
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Visualisations aren’t the only end result of data journalism

My friend and former colleague Simon Rogers, editor of the Guardian’s Data blog, has posted a defence of the increasing use of data visualisation. I agree to a point, but I also think it’s really important to remember that visualisations are not the only product of data analysis. They can help readers see patterns in complex sets of data, but I also think that sometimes we’re missing other opportunities with data analysis by focusing on data visualisation. Sometimes, the result isn’t a visualisation but a key insight that underpins a story. I often worry about the problem of seeing a world as full of nails when you think all you have is a hammer. Sometimes, visualisations are just not the right end product of data journalism.

I’ve heard statisticians grumble about information being seen as simply beautiful instead of being, well, informational. Good data visualisations hit a middle way being being beautiful and simplifying complex concepts. I’ve heard designers grumble about data visualisations that aren’t beautiful, and they rail away against the lack of aesthetic of some of the publicly available tools. Sometimes people are using the wrong chart or visualisation to visualise their data. When it comes to charts, I often show this simple chart during training, which really breaks down what types of charts or visualisations are appropriate for what kind of data you’re working with.

I am always in favour of the democratisation of tools, but when it comes to digital story-telling, editors need to remember all of the techniques available and have a clear way of deciding which technique is appropriate.

10.07.11
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Emily Cummins – my Ada Lovelace Day Heroine

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, the annual celebration of the achievements of women in science, tech, engineering and maths. As the Tweets flow thick and fast and the new website holds its ground, it’s time for me to think about my own contribution.

This year I have chosen Emily Cummins as my Heroine. At just 24, Emily has already won a number of awards and accolades because of her work on sustainable tech. She was named one of the Top Ten Outstanding Young People in the World 2010, won the the Barclays Woman of the Year Award in 2009, and was Cosmopolitan magazine’s Ultimate Save-the-Planet Pioneer 2008.

One of Emily’s most notable inventions is an evaporative refrigerator that doesn’t need electricity, for use in developing countries for the transport and storage of temperature-sensitive drugs. But it’s not just her inventiveness that makes Emily a great role model – it’s her willingness to tinker, try things out, and invent. And that is something she puts down to having been supported in her tinkering as a child. She said in this interview with Female First:

I had a really inspirational granddad who gave me a hammer when I was four years old! We used to spend hours together in his shed at the bottom of the garden, taking things apart and putting them back together again. By the time I started at high school it meant I already understood the properties of different materials and how certain machinery worked. I’d always had a creative spark and because it was encouraged from an early age I suppose I had the confidence to take it forward and start inventing for myself.

There’s a very valuable lesson there to anyone who has daughters, granddaughters or nieces: Give them hammers, screwdrivers and, when they’re old enough, power tools. Encourage them to spend time in the garden shed or the garage with you, learning not just how to take things apart, but how to put them back together again. It’s through playing with technology – both hi-tech and lo-fi – that we learn how it all works, and once we know how it works, we can invent.

I don’t have a daughter but I do have a niece, and I love buying her the science and technology kits and toys that no one else thinks to get for her. I know she loves her chemistry set and her electric circuitry set, and she knows that she’ll get more fun things to play with from me that she can’t yet even guess at. I hope that that, as she gets older, she’ll remember how much fun she finds them and will carry on thinking of herself as someone who can do science and tech, and won’t give in to boring gender stereotypes.

Emily makes a great role model for girls like my niece, and young women, but also for those of us who are a little older, who deep down, just want to get out into the garden shed and start tinkering. Emily shows us just what women can achieve, given the room to experiment and invent. And we all ought to remember that it’s not too late to get ourselves a hammer and start making stuff.

10.06.11
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In memory of the vision of Steve Jobs

I woke up this morning where I wake most mornings these days, in a hotel room, and flipped on CNBC, one of the few English language TV stations I can get on the hotels 1500 channel satellite system. They were playing what I thought was an Apple retrospective, but I had missed the beginning. I was looking at my email and saw a message from the editor of FirstPost.com, a site that Suw and I helped launch. Suw is now the contributing technology editor for the site, and I have the grandiose title of writer-at-large, apt for the roving reporter that I am. The email just said get in touch when you’re up. Before the piece on CNBC was finished and I had read another email, I realised that Steve Jobs had died.

I never met Steve Jobs, although I did get close at MacWorld in 2000, which I covered as Washington correspondent for the BBC News website. It was MacWorld New York when he introduced the ill-fated Cube, one of the few flops of his storied second coming. I wrote this of my brush with Steve Jobs:

I was trying to make my way through the crowd of people swarming around the new sleek offerings from Apple at MacWorld when suddenly the crowd split.

It was as if Moses had parted the sea of people.

There he stood in signature black shirt and jeans, the man who made and later saved Apple: Steve Jobs.

For a man I never really met, I was caught off guard by how much Steve Jobs’ death affected me. Working on the piece for FirstPost, I found myself tearing up on several occasions, especially after watching the Think Different advertisement that he narrated, one that was never shown. It felt as if he was narrating his own eulogy.

In all the tributes and reminiscences rolled by today, a 1985 Playboy interview with Steve Jobs (might not want to click on that link at work – Steve’s clothed but the women in the ads aren’t) was making the rounds, and as I read it, I was struck several times why he deserves to be called a visionary. On the information revolution, he said:

We’re living in the wake of the petrochemical revolution of 100 years ago. The petrochemical revolution gave us free energy–free mechanical energy, in this case. It changed the texture of society in most ways. This revolution, the information revolution, is a revolution of free energy as well, but of another kind: free intellectual energy. It’s very crude today, yet our Macintosh computer takes less power than a 100-watt light bulb to run and it can save you hours a day. What will it be able to do ten or 20 years from now, or 50 years from now? This revolution will dwarf the petrochemical revolution.We’re on the forefront.

What was really interesting in the article, written in 1985 is that it’s quite clear, at least from the point of view of the interviewer, that the case for having a personal computer hadn’t been made yet. Jobs gave him a reason from his insight into the not so distant, and he really hit the nail on the head.

The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it into a nationwide communications network. We’re just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people–as remarkable as the telephone.

We still are moving through the early days of this revolution, but Steve Jobs saw it coming more than a quarter of a century ago, when he was only 29-years-old. He didn’t make it to see another 29 years. The world lost a visionary, but his inspiration lives on.

09.27.11
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Integrated newsrooms must remember print and digital are different products

I’ve seen integration happen as several newsrooms, and I was at The Guardian as it began integration.* Much of the integration since 2007 has been driven by economic concerns with little focus on products or even efficient newsroom workflow to serve those products. Alan Mutter, who writes the excellent blog Reflections of a Newsosaur, says that as Jill Abramson takes the reins at the New York Times she will have to choose between two irreconcilable paths.

She either will have to cannibalize the flagship print product to build the strongest possible digital franchise for the Times – OR – she will have to concentrate on sustaining the commercial strength of the print edition at the risk of channeling insufficient resources into assuring the strongest possible digital future for America’s newspaper of record. …

The problem for Abramson is that the print and digital media demand significantly differentiated products, which the Times has not been able to produce to date with even its enviable strength.

I think the New York Times has stepped up its game in this respect over the last two years. Andrew de Vigal has done an excellent job honing the multimedia work at the Times, bringing a coherence that has escaped many other newspapers. Aron Pilhofer, interactive news editor at the Times, has done some excellent work in terms of building great projects and doing great journalism with data.

However, I think that Alan hits the nail on the head. Integration makes sense, but it has to be seen in the context of serving different and differentiated journalism products across print and digital media. Torry Pedersen of Norway’s VG has one of the best ways of understanding this. At a conference in 2009, he put it this way:

He then compared newspapers and the web to a bottle of water and a waterfall.  The waterfall represented the web–continues flowing, raw, unlimited and in real time.  The bottled water represented newspapers–limited space, distilled, refined and bottled.

I think this is why The Atlantic and The Christian Science Monitor are navigating the changes in media successfully. They aren’t pitting print versus digital, but strengthening both print and digital products. In 2010, that allowed The Atlantic to turn a profit for the first time in a decade, and it built on that in 2011 even as many other publishers struggled. Yes, The Atlantic beefed up its web presence, but it also put a focus on writing talent. In 2011, it’s profits doubled in print, digital and events. It improved all of its businesses and even built new revenue streams.

More broadly though, one of the things that I see in terms of news organisations is that those who develop not only great journalism projects but also marketable journalism and information products are the ones best navigating the wrenching changes in the journalism business. This is a mix of transaction businesses, such as those at Fairfax in Australia or Schibsted’s digital classified business, Finn. Some of those transaction businesses might be built around data, especially business data. The products also usually include events such as conferences or dinners, cruises or talks with key journalists. As Suw and I build our little consultancy, the real gap in journalism businesses we see is not necessarily of editorial innovation but of product and revenue innovation.

* I get a sense that The Guardian is only now moving through the first process of integration as it unifies its ‘digital first’ strategy largely under the management of print editors.

09.23.11
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Facebook and media: Show me the revenue!

After the Facebook announcements yesterday at its 2011 f8 developers conference, I’ve been trying to find the revenue model for the media apps. Will Facebook share revenue? Is this just a traffic driver? This is especially a concern if the audience never has to leave Facebook to read stories. How will these news organisations capture the value from the Facebook audience? I’m not finding many answers.

AdAge has a great story answering some, but not all, of these questions, but the answers should raise alarm bells for news organisations struggling to monetise their digital content. “Stories don’t link out to the publisher and can be read within Facebook.” So, will Facebook be paying for this content? Will news organisations now be counting Facebook impressions in their traffic stats? Will news organisations be able to sell ads against their content in Facebook? If that is the case, then Facebook will obviously want a cut of this.

Revenue models seem either non-existent or not well thought out.

When asked about the revenue model for Social Reader, a Washington Post spokeswoman said, via email, “The focus right now is on getting people to use it.”

What? You’re joking right?! At least the News Corp spokesperson said that there might be some ad support and it would tie into other apps. Clear Channel wouldn’t comment on the revenue model for its iHeartRadio app.

Simply getting eyeballs isn’t enough in 2011, and the lack of detail about how these news organisations plan to capture revenue from these apps to support journalism is very, very worrying.

09.11.11
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9/11 memories: Finding my way back home

I’m not a big fan of anniversaries in journalism, and I especially feel this way about 11 September 2001.  As the Washington correspondent for the BBC News website then, we looked back at three months, six months and then one year. The entire year was dominated by looking back at that day. After 10 years, I can’t help but think back to that day.

Like most of my colleagues with the BBC in Washington, I found myself away from the city on the day. We were almost all on assignment or on holiday. My colleague Stephen Sackur was in central America. He and his crew had to drive all day and all night for three or four days, spending several hours in a huge queue at the Mexican border. Nick Bryant was in Seattle on holiday. When the story broke, he found a local television station and immediately started doing lives.

I was in London visiting face-to-face with my editors for the first time in more than a year. I was sitting in the Foyer, one of the BBC staff cafes, with my friend Tim Weber from our business team. UPDATE: Tim remembers the day:

https://twitter.com/#!/tim_weber/status/112871385919004672

We looked up and saw a sky scraper on fire. At first I thought it was in Asia, but then saw that it was the World Trade Center in New York. We rushed up to the newsroom. Soon after the second plane hit, and we started to think about whether I should go back to the US. What happened next still gives me chills. The BBC News channel cut to a different feed, and I could see the presenter pausing, listening in his earpiece. Before he spoke, I said to myself with the horror of recognition, “That’s not New York. That’s Washington. That’s our live position at the White House.” Over the next several minutes as we made plans for me to get back to the US, several rumours flashed over the wires of a car bomb outside the State Department and fires on the National Mall. All were false, but for a time, it seems like Washington and New York were descending into chaos.

When I saw the pictures of Washington, my first thought was about my girlfriend at the time, Linda. She worked for a defence contractor and was a civilian staff member for the Air Force Chief of Staff. She occasionally worked at the Pentagon. Fortunately, I was able to reach her via email and find out that she was OK. I found out later that she had actually been in a classified briefing about “future threats” in a a SCIF, a secure compartmented information facility, a shielded, secure conference room in Arglinton. Someone interrupted the briefing, came in, turned a TV on to CNN, which was showing the towers on fire and said curtly, “This is what we mean.”

I was already scrambling to get to Heathrow. I rushed out of the newsroom, my colleagues asking if my friends and family were OK. I’m still touched by the kindness of my colleagues that day. Back at my hotel, I threw my clothes in my suitcase and soon was in a mini-cab to Heathrow. My driver was Iranian, and we talked on the half hour drive to the airport. When he found out that I was American, he asked if everyone I knew was OK. I told him yes as far as I knew. He told me of how he left his country, and I could tell he was very conflicted. He felt caught between a home he loved but was forced to leave and the West which didn’t quite welcome him. It was the first of several times since then I have felt that conflict from people I met from the Middle East.

I arrived at Heathrow, and just as I ran to the United check-in, they shut the gate. The flight had been cancelled. I rang my editor only to find out that all flights to the US and Canada were cancelled. North American airspace was closed. Not only huge numbers of BBC journalists, but Sky and ITV crews as well as members of the British press were all heading up to Stansted. The plan at that time was unclear, the timing of what came next even less. I got money and quickly got into a black cab to take the long trip on the M25 and then on up to Stansted. About 10 minutes into the trip, the first tower fell. My eyes burned and welled up with tears.

I arrived in Stansted to see the assembled masses of the British press corps milling about, upset that they couldn’t leave immediately. If you want to see anxiety, pen a few hundred journalists up in an airport, unable to go anywhere, as one of the biggest stories of their lives is unfolding an ocean away. In what would become common the decade that followed, we were told that everything we carried on the plane as hand luggage had to be carried in see through bags.

I tried to call Linda but the circuits were overloaded to Washington. I found out later that she had walked all the way from Arlington, across the Key Bridge into Georgetown and up the hill to her apartment across from the National Cathedral. I managed to reach my parents to let them know I was OK. As my caged colleagues paced and plotted, I cobbled together a wireless data connection with a mobile phone (much harder to do in 2001 than in 2011) and got online to check email. My inbox was full of friends and family wondering if I was OK, where I was and if I had been anywhere near the Pentagon. As it became clear the wait would be longer, I called home. My father asked if Linda was OK. I said that I thought so because we had emailed shortly after the attacks, but that I couldn’t reach her now because all of the telephone circuits were overloaded. He broke down sobbing.

That was Tuesday night. We spent the next two nights sleeping in a nearby pub with rooms, waiting for the call that our flight was to take off. All of the British press corps were going to travel in a chartered short 747. For young reporters like myself, it was odd to see the high-powered stars of British television and press up close as they frantically waited for flight clearance, and we jokingly referred to the flight as the Ego Trip One.

We waited for two more tense days waiting for North American airspace to open. Thursday night, we finally took off for Montreal.  We arrived at about four in the morning, and I drove with four or five colleagues to Washington. As I wrote for the BBC:

Most of my colleagues drove from Canada to New York but I kept going to Washington, passing by Manhattan on the way.

Heavy rain had fallen the night before and the skies were grey. Rising up from lower Manhattan, smoke still billowed from the shattered skyline.

I arrived back in Washington just as people were observing a national day of mourning, and people had stepped out into the streets of the US capital, my home, with candles.

I rarely wrote first person pieces for the news website, but I wrote a piece about what it was like to come home. I had to clear my head before we set about covering the story, and we wouldn’t take a break for the next month and a half.

It is still the most emotional story that I have ever had to cover. I learned a lot of things in journalism school, but we never had a lesson in dealing with such a traumatic event. In December, we did a series of live web video programmes in New York. One of the webcasts was from the 29th floor of a building overlooking the still smouldering site where the Twin Towers stood. The eerily twisted columns rose from the pile of rubble. On the one year anniversary, I still remember that we had to comfort one of the people we interviewed who hadn’t been back since the day the planes hit. We had to comfort him as he had a panic attack.

The 11 September attacks were also one of those rare stories when my personal life intersected with a story. Linda told me of how a friend in the military who worked at the Pentagon had to go to 39 spouses and tell them that their husband or wife wouldn’t be coming home. I referred to Linda but not by name in the piece I wrote on coming back:

One friend has had nightmares every night since the attacks. On Friday, shortly after I returned, she told me that she had not yet cried – but she was waiting.

A few hours later, she could wait no longer, and she began to sob.

At the time, it didn’t feel right to bring her into the story. This was three years before I started blogging for the BBC, and I didn’t feel comfortable writing in the first person much less getting so personal. This story almost broke that line between my personal and professional, the feelings were so raw.

Now a decade later, part of me can’t believe that I’m not covering the story. Since I left The Guardian, it’s been good to start writing again, mostly for the site that Suw and I helped launch in India, FirstPost.com, but I do miss being a reporter in the field.

Beyond that, I can’t believe it’s been 10 years. So much has happened, but it feels right for me both personally and as a journalist to pause and remember the horrible events of that day. With all of the pain and sadness I witnessed on that day and in the following year, I feel fortunate that one of my lasting memories of that day was the kindness my colleagues showed me as I tried to make sure from afar that friends were safe. From now on, that’s how I will choose to remember the day, one of friendship in crisis.