Some moments in life fix themselves in memory — instances when you can still say, years or decades later, exactly where you were and what you were doing, often down to the minutest detail, when the news broke.
For me, two of those vivid moments arrived by radio, and one by television.
I was eight years old, listening as usual with my family to the BBC Light Programme’s “Friday Night is Music Night” on a November evening in 1963, when the radio broadcast was interrupted with the news that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. It’s the only time I ever remember hearing my father use a curse word.
Seventeen years later, having got up just after dawn to drive to an early work start on a frosty London morning, I turned on the car radio to learn that John Lennon had been shot outside the Dakota building in New York. That time, I was the one doing the swearing.
Then, bleary-eyed on the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, in Guadalajara, I was sipping a mug of hot English breakfast tea when my sister-in-law called and urged me to turn on the television. The brew soon went cold.
By 2001, technology had advanced enough that much of the horror of that morning played out in real time, on-screen, as it happened. Just in case you can’t recall, we were all watching CNN, NBC or Fox News, not scrolling a phone. (Cellphones in 2001 were mostly still just phones.)
The big news organizations were only beginning to build out their websites, and most were rudimentary, reached through dial-up connections that labored under any real load. CNN.com stripped its site down to bare text that morning just to keep its servers from collapsing under the traffic spike. Google’s news aggregator didn’t even exist — it wouldn’t launch until the following year.
Imagine a repeat of that morning today.
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