Thursday, November 29, 2012

This is what a REAL newsroom looks like

news52I saw a photo of a newspaper newsroom on Facebook a few minutes ago and I couldn’t get past the vision of cubicles.

Whoever came up with the idea of cubicles in a newsroom should be banished from print journalism forever (although they probably retired a long time ago).

This (substitute computers for typewriters) is what a real newsroom looks like – wide open with lots of give-and-take and cross-pollination of ideas among the reporters and editors.

This cubicle idiocy is now the rule, rather than the exception, at newspapers across the nation. It was present in the suburban bureaus of The Indianapolis News and The Indianapolis Star, at the Crawfordsville Journal Review and at the Jonesboro Sun.

I think it’s stupid. It promotes isolation and inhibits camaraderie and makes a newsroom look and feel like a goddamned insurance office.

For the record, the guys in this photo of The News City Room are Terry Curry, who is now the Marion County Prosecutor in Indianapolis, and Phil Allen, who is probably retired from public relations by now. He moved to Colorado to do PR for the phone company decades ago.

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