Rex Nelson discusses print newsroom eulogy | CF
Clipped Fresh — By Christopher Spencer on February 2, 2010 at 12:42 PMTime for a eulogy? « Rex Nelson’s Southern Fried.
COMMENT: I didn’t think I would enjoy Rex Nelson’s piece today about the death of old-school newsroom culture. I thought it would be laced with the overly nostalgic romanticism of editors in their 50’s or older.
Instead, I found myself reading the entire entry, enjoying Nelson’s discussion of a piece from the American Journalism Review by Carl Sessions Stepp. It captured some of the best things about the old system.
Here’s a great quote from the article:
“Let us toast those old news roosts and the tribe of rapscallions and reformists they let loose on many a city. Shabby they might have been. Perfect they never were. But who would trade the days you spent there, sassing the boss, dissing the mayor and imperiously threatening to cancel the subscription of anyone who dared complain? All the while doing some of the best work of your life. Think of it as something like leaving the home you grew up in or your first apartment. Its time has passed. Eagerly if warily, you head into the future. But just before you turn the corner, you look back one last time. And the old place and its rich memories seem pretty special.”
Sure, there’s a dynamic quality and a feeling of sheer freedom among those of us working online in small news shops. But, even I, sometimes long for the days when arguments over a single world choice could go up the chain of command because it was deemed that important.
I miss the passion for the written language that was witnessed almost daily in the newsrooms where I served. Every word had a job to do and had to earn its keep in a newspaper story because of the cost of printing.
And that newsroom continues to disappear with the unprecedented pressure in the print journalism world to make a profit and become efficient. There’s no doubt that the atmosphere of the first newsroom I joined in 1998 when the institution was still rather healthy was a far cry from the anemic and dispirited version of 2010.
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1 Comment
I would like to read that whole column one of these days.
I liked what you wrote, too. I worked as a photography intern back in the summer of 1993. Then I did not go back into the newspaper business until 1999, and boy had it changed in just those six years. The words were still important, as you say, and in the weekly where I started we all sat and pored over the copy searching for mistakes before it was sent (digitally) to the press at our company’s nearby daily. Headlines and leads were worded carefully and, sometimes, cleverly. I was a journalist for only about a year, but I mourn for the newsroom of the past. There are some things dying with it that should be the very lifeblood of any journalistic endeavor.