On September 11, 2001, after the magnitude of what happened that morning settled in, I spent much of the rest of the day working on the September 12 edition of a daily news publication about the ad industry I edited for Brill Media. I spent much of the afternoon making calls to advertisers and agency executives to get reactions, especially those located in Lower Manhattan near “Ground Zero.”

The reactions were almost all the same, and in the end, I decided not to publish the September 12 edition -- not because it seemed pointless, but out of respect for the fact that sometimes, things are bigger than what you are normally supposed to do.

It was actually the second time I went through an exercise like that. Six years earlier, as a reporter for Advertising Age, I worked alongside the rest of our editorial team to produce a weekly edition of the magazine devoted to reactions to the domestic terrorism attack that bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and killed 168 Americans.

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