NINE/ELEVEN

Remembering A City Under Siege

It began like a pretty good day. Gorgeous September day, almost exactly like today in New York. Bright sun, warm but not hot, little humidity. I had a job that I had started a year earlier, the first full-time, salary-man position in the five years since I had taken a buyout when new corporate management shut down New York Newsday in 1995, the rising city edition of the superb suburban newspaper at which I'd started 20 years earlier.

The job was at Editor & Publisher, the flagship weekly trade magazine of the newspaper industry. It was top of the line, and always profitable because it owned the newspaper classified franchise. Since college I read E&P and its classifieds, page after page after page of jobs available at newspapers all over the country, all over the world. You could read these ads and decide where you wanted to work, if a small paper in a small town, or a reputable paper in a middle sized town, appealed to your wanderlust, or just your imagination: in the 20th century, ne…