It is with a moment of silence that I type in the story number of every file that appears on the Kansas Farmer website this week.

We number our stories with Monday’s date of the week in which they will be posted, just a housekeeping thing to help all of our teams keep track of articles and photos. This week is 0911. It is has been 16 years — not a “milestone anniversary” so unlikely to get a lot of remembrance attention in a media busy with so many daily happenings.

For those of us who remember that date so vividly, it nonetheless means that every time we hear or write 9/11, there will be flashbacks.

I remember that I, ironically, was attending a World Trade Center convention at the Hyatt Regency Hotel and Convention Center in Wichita as a reporter for the Wichita Eagle. The convention was slated to begin at 10 a.m., but I got there at 7:30 a.m. because I was having breakfast with an old friend from college and had a couple of preconvention interviews scheduled.

The first plane hit around 9 a.m. It was on the lobby TVs, and we all thought it was some sort of horrible accident. A few minutes later when the second plane hit the second tower, we knew it was an attack, and when the Pentagon was hit, all doubt was removed.

The Hyatt was locked down and reporters were not allowed in. I was already there, and I was acutely aware that were I to whip out a notebook or a camera, I’d swiftly find myself outside. So I wandered around, making mental notes and trying to look like just part of the convention.

Many of the attendees of the convention had offices or colleagues who had offices in one of those towers. The highlight trade partner for the convention was Japan. When the first tower came down, there were sobs and shocked faces and even a couple of screams. Someone in front of me said, “Well, now I guess I know how people felt when they heard about Pearl Harbor,” and I heard the sharp intake of breath of a half-dozen Japanese trade delegates behind me.

I didn’t have a cellphone on me. That’s hard to believe today. I went to a pay phone and called my daughters, one after another, and told them to turn on the TV. My youngest daughter had had a baby only a few months old (now a high school junior slated for early graduation, but we won’t discuss that just yet).

I walked around, getting a little bolder about engaging convention delegates in conversation or asking some questions of local trade center leaders. Of course, it only took a bit of settling down time, and observation and security made me as a journalist and tossed me out to join my peers on a street corner, pinned up and waiting for press briefings from authorities with no chance to talk to the people inside whose lives were being forever changed by the events ongoing in New York City.

That kind of “grouping” of the press has only gotten worse in the years since that day. I think that is a shame. I will never forget the firsthand emotions, reactions and horror that I saw in the couple of hours that I was with the ordinary world trade employees who witnessed, on TV, the death of their co-workers and came to the realization that they were alive, in part, because they were picked to attend some rinky-dink conference in practically unheard-of Wichita, Kan. To this day, I remember their faces, their shock, their denial — for yes, there were Muslims in that room.

Part of what is very much wrong with today’s journalism is that penning up of the press in “pools” who are fed “what you need to know” by “spokesmen” who appear every so often and give everybody exactly the same scripted information that teams of image scrubbers have decided will be revealed at this point in time.

Then we wonder why reporters scramble around for “leaks” and try to corner someone who has been in the room behind the scenes who might spill a tidbit about what actually happened. We’ve come a long, long way from the days when we actually had a free press that had freedom to discover the inside stories of what goes on behind the scenes — and that’s why far too often they get a “scoop” that is actually as slanted as the “approved message” they were fed in the first place.

The role of journalism in the formation of the American experiment was to be the independent watchdog that told the people what was happening inside their government. Locked up in “pens” when public events occur, the press cannot fulfill that function. I still think about the real, human stories of the people inside that center that were never told because I wasn’t allowed to write what I observed without notes or recordings. Too much fear of lawsuits. Yes, there were “corporate journalism” decisions in that. I accepted it then as I accept it now.

That doesn’t mean that we don’t know we can do better — and we should do better. Together, let us strive to get there.