{"id":338743,"date":"2026-09-05T10:44:26","date_gmt":"2026-09-05T10:44:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/338743\/"},"modified":"2026-09-05T10:44:26","modified_gmt":"2026-09-05T10:44:26","slug":"inside-portraits-of-grief-the-new-york-timess-9-11-obituary-series","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/338743\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside “Portraits of Grief,” the New York Times’s 9\/11 Obituary Series"},"content":{"rendered":"

Christine Kay, an assistant Metro editor, came running up to my desk. This was on Sept. 13, 2001, and we were in the newsroom of the old New York Times<\/a> building on West 43rd Street. Two days before, the World Trade Center had been hit by two hijacked planes and destroyed. We were all still in shock; the city still smelled like smoke. She said she needed someone to edit victim profiles.<\/p>\n

That someone was me. So began what remains, 25 years later, the assignment of a lifetime. For more than a year, as a rookie staff editor, I ran Portraits of Grief, the paper\u2019s effort to create biographical sketches of each and every person who died at the World Trade Center.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

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\n For Puck Inner Circle members, please Sign in to your Puck account here<\/a>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Christine Kay, an assistant Metro editor, came running up to my desk. This was on Sept. 13, 2001,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":338744,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[5301,127187,127188,127189,127190,9,11,10,91752,127191,5489,127192,7037],"class_list":["post-338743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-9-11","tag-janny-scott","tag-lynette-holloway","tag-michael-brick","tag-n-r-kleinfeld","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-nicholas-kristof","tag-portraits-of-grief","tag-the-new-york-times","tag-wendell-jamieson","tag-world-trade-center"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=338743"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338743\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/338744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=338743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=338743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=338743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}