Reporter's Notebook: Covering The Crash of '87

If you think Wall Street was different 20 years ago, imagine the business of financial TV. But when disaster hits, a story is a story, and the crash of '87 was about as big as they come, especially for a nation that was in the early stages of a revolution in personal finance. The stock market, once the preserve of the powerful and wealthy, was attracting a new generation of investors in the upwardly mobile middle class.

It's hard to believe but CNBC did not exist at the time. The major players in the financial TV news space were CNN and FNN, the latter being where the likes of Bill Griffeth, Sue Herera and Ron Insana first made a name for themselves -- covering the bull market of the mid-1980s and then the October 1987 crash.

In this CNBC.com exclusive "Reporter's Notebook", CNBC TV anchors Griffeth and Herera and former anchor Insana, now a CNBC contributor, remember the market crash and what it was like covering one of the biggest stories of the post-WW II period.