In late August of 2001, some of us arrived on campus at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York City feeling like imposters. Some had zero experience in reporting or writing; others were a bit cocky, with some published work already to our names. We wanted to uncover stories, change the world even, by learning the craft of journalism.
Classes started September 4. We all remember the awkwardness of those early days, learning to approach people and ask questions for “man on the street” interviews, and getting rejected by gruff New Yorkers.
Our professor, Samuel G. Freedman, was tough and demanding. An accomplished reporter at the New York Times, he had also published four widely acclaimed nonfiction books about politics, education and religion. But he had never covered war, or natural disasters, or anything on the scale of September 11, 2001.
On that sunny, blue sky morning 25 years ago, we were spread out across the outer boroughs of New York, microphones in hand, interviewing candidates and voters on primary election day. We’d each chosen a neighborhood to cover that semester for our core class, Reporting and Writing 1.
I was way out in Flatbush, Brooklyn, interviewing a candidate near a polling place, when someone tugged on my arm and told me to look to the skyline. In the distance, we could see a plume of menacing gray smoke, snaking across the horizon, coming from the Twin Towers.
My classmate, Rasheea Hall, was in Flushing, Queens, and saw people gathering around a store with television sets in the windows.
“I heard someone say, ‘The plane hit the building.’ And I thought, ‘What?’ So I walk over there and I see it. They're replaying that footage of the plane hitting the building, and chaos just erupts,” said Hall.
Jenny Brevorka was in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, just across the East River from Manhattan, with a view of the World Trade Center. Standing in a crowd of people on a corner, they watched the towers fall.
“I had my recorder on. I wasn't courageous enough to be asking people questions, and I felt very awkward about that. But I remember I recorded the crowd crying out, not crying with tears, but surprise, when the tower fell, and you could hear the noise across the river.”
Many of us spent the day trying to get back to our apartments. Subways were shut down and cell phone service didn’t work for hours. People began walking home.
“Getting closer to the bridges, just the stream of people walking across, covered in ash and dust," recalled Brevorka. "It was like out of a zombie movie."
Back to class
Freedman collected his second- and fourth-grader from school and tried to shield them from the news, as he thought about how he would teach his 15 or so graduate students in the days and weeks ahead.
"I knew right away this was the biggest challenge I'd ever had as a teacher,” said Freedman.
He thought to himself: “What is this like? These people are just beginning to learn how to do journalism, and they've been plunged into an existentially frightening moment on the one hand, but also the biggest story in the world to cover on the other."
He decided we would meet for class as scheduled on September 12.
My classmate, Anne Sachs, recalled how we sat in a circle, and shared what we’d seen and experienced, if our loved ones were all okay, and how we felt.
“I was so overwhelmed. I didn't know how I felt other than shocked and terrified,” said Sachs.
It was an unusual approach for a class made up of Generation X, born in the mid-1960s to early 1980s.
“We're keep-it-together kind of generation. We just were not ever asked how we felt on a regular basis in the workplace,” said Sachs.
The debrief worked. It was the beginning of a process, of teaching us how to integrate our own feelings and experiences with the professionalism, ethics and standards we needed to be good reporters.
After we talked, Freedman read aloud two pieces of writing. One, a narrative nonfiction by a former student, Leah Hager Cohen, about the tension between normal life and war in a small town. The second was an essay about grief and remembrance, written by a former New York Times reporter and Vietnam veteran, Michael Norman.
“Other journalists have had to face horrible moments like this," Freedman said. "They know somehow what you feel, and they've made it through, and given meaning to it in words, and so will you.”
Be brave
“He was really encouraging people to go out and be brave and find the stories that were not obvious. To go and find the stories of everyday people struggling with this,” said my classmate Amy Miller.
Her beat was Astoria, Queens, with a large North African and Arab immigrant population.
“It got me to go to places I wouldn't have gone before, to Coptic churches and mosques,” she said.
“At that time there was a lot of backlash against anybody who was different, especially brown folks,” said Hall.
“It made me want to kind of sit down and quietly talk to people about their experiences rather than to untangle what happened. I was more interested in the response. I was more interested in people's emotional connection to the moment than I was in the straight news.”Anne Sachs
In Flushing, which also had a lot of immigrants from around the world, “there was a lot of fear about what could happen to them and how people would treat them. A lot of those folks had businesses, and they didn't want people to think that they agreed with what had happened, or that they had some vendetta against America,” said Hall.
In Jackson Heights, Queens, my classmate, Franziska Bruner got a tip one day while visiting a record store that sold South Asian music and mixed Pakistani music with hip hop.
“This guy told me something really bad is happening, that people are beating up Sikhs,” said Bruner. Sikhs are part of a peaceful South Asian religion and wear turbans. They were being mistaken for terrorists, and assaulted.
“He was really nice about taking me around to different people and taking me to their temple and talking to people so that I could get the story of what was happening,” she said.
“I think in those weeks we all saw just the best in people and sometimes the worst in people,” said Bruner.
On my beat, in Flatbush, I wrote about Black-owned businesses, church leaders and politicians that found ways to help the recovery effort and support families of Caribbean nationals who were killed while working in the Twin Towers.
I also attended dozens of funerals for New York City firefighters, 343 of whom died on 9/11, and began writing about the FDNY Emerald Society bagpipe band, which played at every service.
Covering grief was a huge part of that year. Memorials to the nearly 3,000 people missing sprung up all over the city, with posters showing smiling faces alongside desperate pleas for information.
One day, we were assigned to cover a memorial of some kind, and Sachs ended up at Imagine Circle in Central Park. A woman told her, “’I'm looking for my husband.’ And gave this description, in the same way that you might tell like a police officer, he was wearing this and he had this color hair,” Sachs said.
“We knew no one was coming home really soon after it happened because you saw the rubble,” she said. “And I just remember being like, okay, I’ll write all that down. Knowing that the only thing you could do for her was to listen to her tell this story about the person she loved who she couldn't find anymore.”
Brevorka recalled covering Sally Regenhard, who lost her firefighter son and became a prominent advocate for skyscraper safety after 9/11, and writing about a Muslim family who could not hold a funeral for their loved one without a body to bury.
We all remember the acrid smell of death and pulverized buildings that permeated the city for months afterward, a constant reminder of the horror in lower Manhattan.
Portraits of grief
Through these weeks, we sometimes fought off tears while interviewing someone, or found ourselves crying afterward. We wondered when was it appropriate to help, or observe, to comfort someone, or to stay distant.
Our adjunct professor that year was Mirta Ojito, who was then a reporter at the New York Times, and part of a team working on a series called Portraits of Grief.
“They weren't necessarily obituaries. They were in fact the opposite of it. We were writing portraits of life, not of death,” said Ojito.
One day in class she told us about interviewing a father. She'd been assigned the story, and was told he had lost his adult daughter. But in speaking with him, “he kept talking about two, and then I realized that he was talking about two daughters.”
Midway through the interview, she realized the man had lost both his girls that day.
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“And I had to stop because I was so emotional that I couldn't continue with the interview. It was terrible."
Ojito told the man she would call him back, and escaped to a bathroom down the hall.
"I felt that I had failed as a journalist and as a person. And then I got to the bathroom and I found another reporter who had been working at the Times forever, older than me, and she was weeping as well. So, we both hugged each other, and I derived some strength from that."
By recounting that story to her students, Ojito taught us that we didn't check our humanity at the door, and our work could be better because of it.
Freedman held regular check-ins with us one-on-one, and made rigorous edits of our work. At times, he took on what he described as a pastoral role with his students.
“And I think this is key, because it wasn't always the way journalism was at this time, that if they confided moments of tension or anxiety or fear to me, that I wouldn't think less of them as a journalist. I would think more of them for the ability to be candid about what they were feeling and to try to work through it,” he said.
“It's always -- in editing and in teaching -- a balance between driving people hard, setting a super-high standard, modeling that standard in your own work, but also giving people the sense that improvement is always possible, and that when they do things well, when they make progress, you're going to draw attention to that,” said Freedman.
“And giving a sense that you were adding something to the historical record, that this wasn't just something you were doing for class, but that you were really making a contribution, which I totally believe to this day,” he said.
How it changed us
Just one classmate from our group made her way to Ground Zero that night, Sonya Chawla.
“There was this desperate need inside of me to see if I could do something to help. And it didn't feel like I could do anything to help by being at least physically so far away from what had happened,” Chawla said.
The smoke, and darkness remain vivid in her memory, even today.
“I remember picking up some trash or metal from the ground and putting it into a place that looked like people were piling things into. And then I remember feeling so overwhelmed by the sadness around me from people that were clearly grieving, and thinking to myself about the last thing I wanted to do was go up and ask them questions about it,” she said.
“One of the other things I realized being there was that I wasn't skilled enough yet in anything to help anybody.”
By the second semester, Chawla enrolled in a science reporting class, and decided that she would apply to medical school. Today, she’s a doctor of internal medicine.
“The skills that I learned in journalism school helped make me into the doctor that I am,” said Chawla. “I learned how to listen to people. I learned how to hear their stories, and I learned how to document them. And if you think about it, that's a really key aspect to being a good doctor, and something that's not taught in medical school.”
For Sachs, that year helped her realize what kind of reporter she did – and did not – want to be.
“It made me want to kind of sit down and quietly talk to people about their experiences rather than to untangle what happened. I was more interested in the response. I was more interested in people's emotional connection to the moment than I was in the straight news,” said Sachs, now senior director of brand strategy at Code and Theory.
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Brevorka, who came into J-school with no reporting experience, took an investigative reporting class during her second semester, and wrote about why the towers fell. She also realized her ability to empathize with people was a strength, not a weakness.
“I spent the next two years of my career as a journalist, being a police reporter. I talked to people about their dead family all the time,” she said. Today she is a lawyer, and credits journalism school with shaping how she approaches her legal career.
“There comes a point where there is a catharsis in settling a case where the other side gets to say their piece, and you listen. You just listen,” said Brevorka.
Miller said she might have been “satisfied with more superficial stories” if she’d been educated any other year. “But after 9/11, you just couldn't.” Today, Miller is a senior reporter covering artificial intelligence regulation for MLex.
For Bruner, who is now a teacher in a small town in Yucatan, Mexico, that year taught her she “could contribute something to my community with my words.”
And for Hall, now senior vice president of standards and practices at Fox Entertainment Group, “it just made me an even more curious person.”
That year “helped me understand that you can't take people at the surface. There's so much underneath that, especially as a journalist, you have to dig and dig and dig and dig. Sometimes that takes time, to really to get the story,” said Hall.
For me, I feel incredibly lucky to have landed in Freedman’s classroom, and also to have been co-taught by Ojito – now senior director of standards at NBC Telemundo -- and the late David Klatell on the broadcast side of the class. It was the most meaningful year of my life.
I went on to take Freedman’s book writing seminar in the second semester, and with his help, wrote a book, published in 2004, about the funerals that year through the lens of the FDNY bagpipers who played at them all.
In talking to my classmates and professors for this story, we all spoke of how we bonded through the trauma of that year. Most of us flew from around the country to New York City in the spring of 2025 to celebrate Professor Freedman’s retirement from teaching after 35 years.
He told us that when packing his office, he’d found a manila folder of our work that year, which we’d published on a Columbia website called Terror and Response.
"It was like discovering this time capsule of everything you all had done with just your brains and your heart and your spirit, and done to such a high gloss," he said.
Through the years that followed, as we took the lessons he taught us into our professional and personal lives, Freedman often spoke of us, and our work, to his current students.
That "is going to be always the most important class I taught,” he said.
