How the September 11, 2006 cover of the New Yorker came to be. (Via Emdashes.) The September 11 New Yorker actually had two covers: the outer cover was white, with an image of a tightrope walker, obviously alluding to Philippe Petit; the next page was another cover, containing the same image of the tightrope walker but this time standing over the World Trade Center site.

Here’s a fascinating article about TV news coverage five years ago today.

The news came into Matt Lauer’s ear as he interviewed a Howard Hughes biographer on what felt like another slow news day in the summer of shark attacks and Chandra Levy.

“Go to commercial,” “Today” executive producer Jonathan Wald told him tersely. “Breaking news: A plane has hit the World Trade Center.”

I’ve felt the weight of 9/11 today more than I have on past 9/11 anniversaries. Maybe it’s because five is one of those milestone numbers; maybe it’s because this is the first 9/11 anniversary in three years to fall on a weekday; maybe it’s because I’m not currently working; maybe it’s because I’ve been watching so much original 9/11 news footage today. CNN.com has been showing CNN’s original 9/11 coverage today in real time, since 8:30 this morning, exactly as it unfolded, and it’s still on; MSNBC ran NBC’s original coverage this morning, also in real time, from 8:53 until noon.

This describes well the feeling you get while watching it – it’s like opening a time capsule. Now, five years later, we tend to view everything that happened as one event, but it’s something else to re-watch everything happening as it happened. I stepped away from the computer for a few hours today, and went I came back in the evening I turned on the original CNN coverage again, and now the “live” footage showed lower Manhattan getting dark as the sun went down, just as the sun was going down here in 2006. Eerie.

Newspapers are usually seen as the first draft of history, but five years ago, when the first newspapers *finally* came out, it had been nearly 24 hours since everything had happened. “Everything that happened” happened before 11 a.m., and there was still an entire day ahead to try and begin absorbing everything. When I finally read the first newspaper accounts the next morning, they seemed so long overdue.

I’m really looking forward to this day being over so I can get it out of my head again.

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