MSNBC rebroadcast their 9/11 NBC broadcast and I watched it for about 90 minutes this morning, until the fall of the second twin tower. It's the news account I watched that morning, 10 years ago.

My journalist eye was intrigued by all that has changed in the media and in our awareness of what could happen in an attack of that scope. For example:

• Cell phone technology existed, and many folks had cell phones, but no one could take photos with them or video or send texts or tweets.
• The Today show journalists, Katie Couric and Matt Lauer did a great job, considering. But, for instance, when the first tower went down, Matt said something like "a good chunk of the building seems to have fallen down." It took several more minutes for them to report that the tower had actually collapsed. Likely, they couldn't imagine that the towers could come down. It didn't exist in our "imagination."
• That's likely why, when the first tower was hit, everyone thought it was a small plane and an accident. Now if a plane hits a building, we would automatically think terrorism.
• At The Spokesman-Review that morning, we put out an "Extra" Spokesman-Review. It was our last one. We also had 100 more journalists in the newsroom than we do today.
• We had a website back then, and it was a good, progressive one, but media websites were not used in the ways they are now. For instance, this week I posted about 45 photos on a 9/11 website picture story about people's memories of visiting the twin towers. We only had room for five in the actual newspaper story.

(Photo courtesy of George Buckley of Spokane who kept the brochure he received at the towers, as well as his ticket to the observation deck)

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