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Imagine waking up one morning, going into your job, doing all the “to-do” checklist things—and a major event happens. Your well-planned day just changed. People scurry around and make phone calls, text people in important places, gather information, and share it with a community, city, and world in one finished product.
Take out the major event part above and you’d have a pretty basic view of what takes place in a newsroom. It can happen either in a large metropolitan city’s newspaper or the community one located right on the city’s town square.
Newsrooms have been thrust into the spotlight for many reasons over the decades. Most recently, it was because a mad gunman shot and killed five people and wounded many others at The Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis, MD. Among those killed were longtime journalists and reporters, simply focused on writing about interesting topics, subjects, and people for their communities.
While newsrooms (and the focus here will be on newspapers, with a tip of the cap to TV and radio ones) have changed and shifted over the past 20-plus years, there are viable reasons for them to still exist. Maybe through one person’s view you can come along for a little peek into what actually happens in there.
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When I was younger, I knew that I wanted to be a sports writer. I wanted to go cover all the big events—the Super Bowl, the World Series, Stanley Cup Finals, World Cup, NBA Finals, The Final Four in NCAA basketball, and others. Where does one become a sports writer? Ah, start at the bottom and work your way up. From a college newspaper world, I ventured forth into the interesting and wild world of my local newspaper: The Beaumont Enterprise in Beaumont, Texas.
This was a very new experience not only in what I wanted to do with my life, yet also meeting so many different men and women, dedicated to their craft. It also was about a man getting out of his sheltered lifestyle.
People worked together during good and bad times. Young reporters would come into the Enterprise, get some experience for a year or two, then move on to bigger newspapers or find their true calling and get out of the business. Reporters, photographers, editors, copy editors, page designers, and clerks all helped in newsroom tasks.
Were there moments when people were upset? Yes, because that’s humanity. Were there moments when people were laughing uproariously over something? Yes, because that’s humanity. Newsrooms are still today filled with very human people, doing the best they can to deliver stories and facts as best as possible.
If I had a little time to look around the newsroom, then it was hard not to appreciate what others were doing. Every single person in there was dealing with life as best as possible. A few good souls that I have worked with in newsrooms with as many as 70-80 people to as few as 8-10 people are not around anymore. I learned a lot from them. See, you forge friendships at most places and you never forget the good people who offered a helping hand along the way.
Getting stories put together for a deadline does take some teamwork. A reporter writes his or her story and passes it along to a city or local editor. That person reads and edits it, asking the reporter questions about this figure from a school board or city council meeting. It might be about a local sports star getting caught in serious trouble and asking the reporter if this or that fact is correct.
From there, the story moves along the chain to what is called the copy desk. A copy editor reviews the story and either places it on a news page or assigns it to another copy editor to do so. This is not a one-person show, friends. It’s teamwork. Much of this framework does not exist at the local or city level anymore as jobs have been shifted by corporations into hubs or, well, simply cut away due to financial reasons.
Some involved in the teamwork might think pretty highly of themselves and, yes, egos can run wild in newsrooms. Much like in your own place of business, too, whether it be baking cakes or fixing broken pipes under a bathroom.
People care about the work that they do. They pour their heart and soul into it and want to give readers—both lovers and haters of the final product—something to think about and ponder. People also get to actually know other people, observe their quirkiness and humanness, and are there when they lose a loved one or have a relationship end.
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Thinking that you know about how a newsroom works when you haven’t spent a single day or week in the middle of it all is ridiculous. Those people working at The Capital Gazette were simply doing their jobs, writing stories about the community…everything from serious news stories to the 10-year-old soccer team finishing second at the state tournament.
A newsroom today (with an exception made at the community newspaper level) does not even look the same as it did 20 or 30 years ago.
For some of you reading this piece, I know you are so happy to know that newsrooms have been stripped bare of what made them so great. There will be many others, though, who passed through the doors of a newsroom a few times and will have special memories.
There have been plenty of personal escapades in my own newsroom journeys, seeing newspapers close their doors, jobs cut back, getting the heave-ho after a 90-day trial period, or having the pleasure of covering the business world in a good-sized community.
Newsrooms will always be around. They serve a purpose to disseminate news and community events to people—even millennials who swear by the almighty power of the online world—who love to keep in touch with their town’s activities.
Today’s world of working remotely is a wonderful gift. A person can be anything they make up their minds and work toward their goal through the use of a phone, laptop, and Wi-Fi.
A newsroom provides a powerful testimony to people helping people. I don’t say this as some corporate shill or sellout to a media company. People actually do give a damn about what they do. Have people moved on to other fields of work or life beyond a newsroom? Yep. If one works in a newsroom long enough and becomes jaded too much, then it might be a sign that it’s time to move along.
Yet there are those who remain inquisitive, interested in knowing the ins and outs of how a local or large-town businessman or celebrity made it to the top. They want to tell people about the local high school team fighting through the ranks to the state playoffs. They want to tell people about the church, synagogue, mosque, or community center making a difference through its service to humanity. They also want to tell people about the serious matters affecting their town – new construction, crime, political shenanigans, and the list goes on and on.
Having newsrooms become filled with widget-makers and a bunch of “yes” people don’t serve a community or the world well.
They do serve a purpose, though. People will be waiting for a newspaper in a small town, whether it is weekly, twice a week, or six days a week with Sundays off. Heck, they’ll even cut out a picture or story about their business and put it up for people to see. It’ll get a little tattered and torn from being nailed to the bulletin board. But it is something they can see, feel a sense of pride in, and—even if there are mistakes made in the story itself—hopefully know their contributions to a town were recognized.
Newsrooms are still alive and well today. They look and are different from many years ago and, no, I’m not pining for “the good old days.” I hope you will have a sense of appreciation around what these men and women do on a daily basis. Their own humanity shines through their work all the time. You just have to look for it. It’s there.
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Photo credit: Getty Images