Formerly editor-in-chief of News Corporation's Sydney newspapers, The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph, Allan had arrived in New York four months earlier to edit its only US title, the New York Post. Most recently, his front page had been dominated by the case of missing intern Chandra Levy and a scandal involving a local publicist and her four-wheel drive vehicle – small- to medium-sized stories, certainly nothing like this.

Then again, nobody had ever experienced anything like this. By the end of the day it would be known that Arab terrorists had hijacked four passenger planes and used them as weapons in a bold daylight attack on New York City and Washington DC. President George W. Bush would inform Americans they were at war.

At this stage, however, no one could be sure what was going on – including Allan who, still dripping, went to the bedroom and turned on the television.

"I could see that there was black smoke coming out of one of the towers. I thought, 'That's amazing!"' he says. "I had looked out the window and it was a very clear, blue day, a lovely day, and I thought, 'How could a plane hit the tower when the weather's so good?'

"And as I'm sitting there this other one comes in and slams into the other building. I knew then that something terrible was happening. As soon as I watched the second aircraft hit the other tower I knew what was going on."

At that moment, down south in Atlanta, Georgia, about 50 CNN news chiefs were halfway through their normal weekday editorial conference.

Chris Cramer, president of CNN International News Networks, remembers that the day's story list didn't look too exciting. President Bush was in Florida for a photo op with some schoolkids, trouble was still simmering in Zimbabwe, Kofi Annan was back from the racism conference in South Africa. Then word was brought of the first plane crash in New York and the room went deathly quiet.

A veteran newsman who started his broadcasting career with the BBC in the early 1970s and moved to CNN five years ago, British-born Cramer has been among the first to hear about some of the biggest stories of our time. But nothing in his experience compares to that day.

"I have never seen a newsroom so shocked," he says. "I've seen newsrooms shocked by atrocity, I've seen them shocked by live coverage like the Challenger disaster, and other things like the Princess of Wales dying, but I've never seen a newsroom kind of . . . stunned.

"The second crash was really, 'Oh my God, did that really happen?' And then a third crash and a fourth and is there a fifth? It was a very extraordinary, a surreal experience. People left the room in complete silence."

Back in New York the situation also seemed surreal. Allan sat in front of his TV set for probably five minutes, watching the twin towers burn. "Stunned," he says. "Just couldn't believe it."

Then he got dressed and got out, jumping on the subway at 86th Street. By this time, however, Manhattan's subway system was already beginning to seize: the train stopped at 59th Street and didn't move. So he jumped out and ran the remaining 11 blocks to the Post's office on Avenue of the Americas.

"And I've been here ever since," he says. "We threw just everybody at this. We put out an afternoon edition, then we went to work on the Wednesday paper and we were all here till two, three o'clock in the morning. It was a lot of work."

For Allan, a side-effect of the experience was that he at last began to feel a true sense of belonging to his new fiefdom. "It seems that in three days I achieved something that I hadn't in the four months that I've been here, and that is to really get to know the staff of the newspaper very well and, frankly, bond with them," he says, adding: "They have been magnificent, they really have."

The Wednesday edition of the Post had 104 pages and almost all of them dealt with the previous day's tragedy. Even its renowned gossip column, Page 6, was pushed out, for the first time in 25 years. "It's not possible to write about canoodling supermodels or dyspeptic pop divas when terrorists are killing our friends and relatives and scaring our children," explained chief gossip writer Richard Johnson.

The Post's headline was simply: "ACT OF WAR". Others across the nation included "INFAMY" in The Washington Times, "HOW MANY DEAD?" in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and, in The San Francisco Examiner, an angrily expostulative "BASTARDS!"

At CNN headquarters in Atlanta the mechanics of newsgathering, what Cramer calls "the slightly ghastly ritual to a major tragedy", were also hitting high gear.

"You kick into a somewhat robotic mode and just do what you need to do," he says. "Determine where your resources are, deploy your crews and correspondents and back-up staff. Reinforce if the story looks bigger. Then double the number of staff you first sent to allow for 24-hour cover and continuous transmission."

Even CNN's vast resources were stretched as the network raced to get crews to the disaster scenes in New York, Washington DC, where the Pentagon had been hit, and Pennsylvania, where the fourth of the kamikaze planes had crashed into a field, before every airport in the US was locked down.

By sticking a camera out of the window of its New York office, CNN was able to broadcast the first live pictures of the unfolding tragedy at the World Trade Centre. It also purchased some of the best footage of the second plane crash, filmed by a camcorder-toting passerby, for a reported $US50,000 ($94,000).

In one stroke of luck, although perhaps not for him, correspondent Nic Robertson had just been permitted to enter Afghanistan to cover the trial of the Western aid workers. While most other foreign reporters were soon evacuated on UN planes, for fear of US reprisals, Robertson stayed behind with a videophone in Kabul's Intercontinental Hotel.

One of the first decisions that had to be made at CNN concerned the title for its coverage. "Is it appropriate for us to use the phrase 'America Under Attack' on the screen?" someone asked. "Well, what the hell else is this?" was the reply.

Around the world, but especially in the US, the media coverage of the assault and its aftermath exploded all previous concepts of a saturation point. Every other story simply vaporised.

In the first days, the main free-to-air and cable news networks – CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox and CNN – broadcast nothing but non-stop, commercial-free coverage of the catastrophe, which, according to some analysts, cost them as much as $US100 million a day in lost advertising revenue.

Many non-news cable channels, from MTV to the Home Shopping Network, also broadcast 24-hour news. Some, such as the Food Network and QVC, which couldn't get access to a news feed simply suspended all programming and broadcast classical music and a fixed picture of something tasteful, such as a vase of flowers.

Current affairs magazines Time, Newsweek and US News & World Report all rushed out special editions, which reached newsstands on Friday, followed by bumper issues of their regular editions on Monday.

Other magazines were forced to pull apart their completed editions and start from scratch. The New Yorker dispatched its entire staff to report on the destruction. People replaced its cover story on shark attacks with a pictorial record of the day's events. Business fortnightly Fortune pulled 60 pages of ads from its upcoming issue which it deemed included "inappropriate" images, such as pictures of aircraft and the World Trade Centre.

The day after the disaster The New York Times printed 2.4 million copies, double its usual number. Staff of The Wall Street Journal had to be evacuated from their offices in the shadow of the twin towers to New Jersey, and for some of the day feared their managing editor had been killed, but still managed to get an abbreviated edition to most of their regular 1.8 million readers.

New media outlets were also stretched to their limits. Popular online news sites all recorded their heaviest ever traffic: cnn.com received 9 million page views an hour compared to its usual 11 million a day, msnbc.com jumped from an average of 3 million unique users a day to 30 million. Sites added servers to cope with the volume and pared back their use of graphics and interactive features to concentrate primarily on text reporting.

Inevitably, as the unthinkable unfolded throughout the day, not all of the coverage was accurate.

When the first crash occurred in New York, TV anchors initially speculated that the plane's navigational system must have gone awry. Early on it was reported that two planes had been hijacked, then as many as eight, then back to four.

One report suggested the hijacked flight that crashed in Pennsylvania might have been shot out of the sky by the US air force. This was later denied. On Tuesday it was said the White House had not been a target, on Wednesday it was discovered that not only had it been a target, but Air Force One, the presidential jet, had been as well. Reports of bomb explosions and gas leaks in New York City came and went, all turning out to be false alarms.

Also confusing was CNN's live footage late on Tuesday showing fires raging in Kabul, leading some to conclude the US had launched an instant revenge attack – which turned out not to be true. Thanks to the modern technology of Robertson's videophone, images were arriving in lounge rooms faster than the information needed to make sense of them.

Overall, however, most of the networks appeared to strive for caution and calm. At CNN: "We have been very careful in the use of language – painstaking – to make sure we're using the appropriate language," Cramer says. "There is a sombreness to the broadcast which might not have been there on all occasions in the past. It's not strident, it's not in your face."

Many news organisations, including CNN and all four Manhattan-based daily newspapers, quickly set up grief counselling services – or "critical incident stress debriefing counselling" in New York Times parlance – for their staff.

"There's a belief that [journalists] should never show our feelings and I think that's, forgive me, bullshit," says Cramer, who has suffered post traumatic stress disorder and now lectures on the subject. "It doesn't mean you have to go around blubbing all the time, but if you are sensitive to what has happened to thousands of people this week, I think that's OK."

Images of terror

WE did not expect restraint. Yet restraint – of a kind – was what we found. Not in every case, by any means, and not all of the time. Yet for the most part, television coverage of the incidents of September 11 was conspicuous for sensitivity.

Immediately upon the news breaking, the four big US networks – ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox – suspended their scheduled programming to provide non-stop coverage of events, a barrage of round-the-clock reports eclipsing even the coverage afforded the Kennedy assassination in 1963.

Back then, CBS devoted 55 hours of news reporting to the event, spread over four days – a yardstick unmatched until the Gulf War in January 1991, by which time network coverage was continuous, and 41 hours of reporting went out over three days.

The ABC network stopped airing the calamity's most spectacular visual images: the two passenger planes striking the World Trade Centre towers and then exploding; those buildings collapsing into rubble. (This in marked contrast to certain other networks, such as CNN, where the scenes were replayed ad infinitum.)

CBS was similarly careful not to exploit the footage, instead, confining its use to stories where it was relevant, such as a discussion about the structural reasons for the buildings' collapse, according to CBS News president Andrew Heyward.

But the dilemma of television news executives over whether to sanitise their rolling coverage of the events in New York and Washington came to a head with the dreadful images of people jumping from the windows from the World Trade Centre to certain death.

Many broadcast the images and most newspapers decided to publish the pictures, but not without some serious discussions on newsroom floors across the globe.

One exception was at Britain's Independent Television News. Editor-in-chief Richard Tait felt the need for sensitivity and a degree of restraint. "We approached the coverage in the knowledge that what we were showing was mass murder and therefore there has to be surrounding the coverage, no matter how dramatic the images, a humanity, a compassion and a restraint," he says. He has long argued that news should not be sanitised just because the reality is unpleasant or disturbing – but ITN decided not to show all the horrific pictures from the World Trade Centre.

Tait says: "We showed shots of people waving at windows who were clearly going to die. But we didn't show people falling out of windows. We discussed it and we decided not to."

Similar concerns engaged BBC News's director, Richard Sambrook, and Nick Pollard, head of Sky News. Sambrook was very aware that because of the time of day, children – including his own seven and nine-year-olds – were watching.

Pollard's first qualms came with the shots of trapped people waving handkerchiefs, but he decided to use the shots, along with a few brief shots of people jumping. He says: "There was a taste and sensitivity thing. There were no lingering close-ups and you don't show people's personal terror. But I don't think there is an absolute right and wrong with these things. You have to make a snap judgment."

In the US, the ABC chose not to show the images of people jumping to their deaths. "I don't believe that showing actual human beings leaping to their deaths [is] helpful," says ABC News president David Westin. While NBC did transmit the footage once, in the first hours after the story broke, it was quickly withdrawn. On CNN, meanwhile, one could see shots of things falling from the World Trade Centre, but the images were not clear, and they were not identified as human beings.

In the wake of the terrorist atrocities, something rare has happened among senior TV executives. They have suspended the traditional pursuit of point-scoring, of boasting about how great their coverage was, and how they got the key pictures 55 seconds before anyone else. The story is too horrendous for that.

But the enormity of the event also posed another problem: ABC anchor Peter Jennings logged some 44 hours on air between Tuesday morning and late Thursday night following the attack, nobody else was letting the story go, either (Dan Rather's three-day mark at CBS was also 44 hours), and it was almost beginning to seem as if the wall-to-wall network news coverage might continue indefinitely.

But it could not, of course, and networks had to grapple with the tough question of when and how they might return to some semblance of regular programming.

It is a question not just of news judgment and cultural sensitivity, but of vital economic import because the new US TV ratings season, representing billions of dollars, was to have started last Monday, and tens of millions of advertising dollars have already been lost during the ad-free news programming. But hanging over any decision was the possibility, even likelihood, that breaking news and a new reading of the tea leaves could change everything again.

This week, some normalcy was beginning to return to scheduling. In Australia, by Thursday last week regular programs began to reappear in the nightly schedule for commercial stations followed by extended news bulletins. While pay TV news channels will likely continue wall-to-wall coverage, what seemed likely for the US networks in the next weeks, experts said, was some combination of regular programming and, perhaps, news updates on the half-hour and a nightly hour of prime-time news.

Shane Danielsen,

The Times, wires