Newsroom Ghosts

Do you remember the 1976 movie “All the President’s Men”?

Based on a book by Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, the movie showed dedicated journalists tracking down the stories that ended the term of President Richard Nixon, who resigned in disgrace.

I was an impressionable 26-year-old at the time, trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. Watching the Watergate break-in stories unfold and reveal the power of the press to help guard our nation’s democracy, I believed I had found my future occupation.

I returned to my often-interrupted college education, this time majoring in journalism. It was a decision that completely changed my life and gave me a career that I look back upon fondly and proudly.

No, I never reported on anything as monumental as the Watergate break-in, the Nixon pre-impeachment hearings or Nixon’s eventual humiliating departure from the White House grounds.

Few reporters ever get those kinds of opportunities.

But it was a career that I loved, through which I was able to meet some very interesting people and write stories about their lives and accomplishments.

And sometimes their misdeeds as well.

I retired from my daily newspaper career at the end of the 1990s but stayed involved in writing for business and online publications for another 20-plus years.

I’ve always regarded the newspaper newsroom as the heartbeat of a community, where everything that’s newsworthy passes through a reporter’s computer, on to a printing press and ends up the next morning on a subscriber’s doorstep.

The newsroom was always a place where phones would be ringing constantly, where reporters, editors and photographers would gather around someone’s desk and plan the coverage for the day.

Or respond to a police scanner and bolt out of the building to go cover a fire, shooting or other unexpected occurrence.

Everyone sweating that end-of-the-evening deadline when it all has to go to the printing presses.

Yeah, that’s how I remember it.

But that has changed.

In my Colorado city, the future of journalism still looked bright as the New Millennium began in 2000. The out-of-town owners of the paper even built an impressive new building next to the one I’d toiled in, with the name of the paper proudly displayed in big letters on its second floor outside front.

But recently, I returned to that new building (the old empty one next door being offered for sale) and was astonished to learn the newspaper was no longer there.

Say what?

Yes, a sign inside indicated that the newspaper was no longer located there, even though the big name was still on the outside. Instead, the interior was occupied by a health plan cube farm, a brewery office and some offices with no discernible names attached to them.

I asked the health plan receptionist what had happened to the newspaper, and she told me that sometime during the pandemic the newspaper did what many other office-based businesses had done: let its workers do their thing from home.

I couldn’t believe it. Instead of the chaotic-but-stimulating newsroom of the past, the reporters and editors were now solitarily holed up in their houses instead of pounding out their stories at their usually messy newsroom desks.

Gone was the camaraderie, the real-time give-and-take that only comes from working in close proximity with others. Bouncing ideas off one another, offering encouragement or criticism when appropriate.

All gone. I don’t know what newspaper reporting is like now, but I’m sure it’s not the same level of satisfaction that comes from daily rubbing shoulders with the rest of the team.

It’s all part of the slow demise – seemingly – of print journalism. Oh, there’s still website-based news "papers" with their pay walls to compensate their now-dispersed staff.

But the excitement and appeal of life in the newsroom, I fear, is quickly disappearing.

And that’s truly a shame.