Newsrooms: May they never die

The place where eccentricity, professionalism co-exist

The night before I left for journalism graduate school in Washington, DC, my brother called to wish me well. But Seamus, seven years older than me, also had an important message that he stressed during our conversation: Do what you love. 

Seamus had been working as a county employee and didn’t like it much, but the salary was decent at a time of double-digit unemployment in our struggling hometown of Buffalo. Options were limited. But I had a chance that a master’s degree would give me. Take it, he said. 

Seamus is gone now, but he would be glad to know that in decades of writing and reporting I had very few unhappy moments.  Being a journalist was like being paid to have fun. I think of that whenever I drive in New London, Conn. and pass the building where I spent nearly 18 years working at The Day, the local daily newspaper.   

But now the building that has been The Day’s home for 116 years has been sold to a developer who plans a mix of residential and commercial space. It is an old story, as papers have lost circulation and newsrooms retain a fraction of the employees they once had. The Day’s staff has shrunk. The need for large printing presses became obsolete once it became possible to print the paper miles away in Providence, R.I. with the click of a computer mouse. The building is just too big. 

The Day is, and has always been, proudly independent. Absent the most extreme circumstances, the paper cannot be sold to a chain because it is held in a trust, its profits distributed among community nonprofit organizations every year. So the sale of its building isn’t the story of a predatory hedge fund like Alden Global Capital, which became one of the largest newspaper publishers in the U.S. in the last 20 years by acting like the capitalist equivalent of a praying mantis. This organization has bought scores of newspapers, sold off their buildings and assets, diverted profits to other investments, fired staff and stripped the papers down to the bones. It stuffed its pockets with money while damaging democracy. 

The Day building on Eugene O’Neill Drive.

The sales of such buildings are not always sinister, but the days when a newspaper headquarters anchored a city downtown are fading fast. Even the Chicago Tribune building, that soaring cathedral of journalism with quotes on freedom of the press chiseled in the walls of its marble lobby, has been sold. 

Like every paper, The Day has been buffeted by the upheaval that has affected journalism.   

When I began to work for The Day in 1988 it was midsized newspaper with about a 40,000 circulation every day. Circulation bumped up to 45,000 on Sundays.  I was one of a three-person staff on its editorial page and there were about 80 in the newsroom. The size of the staff was robust, but paper’s unusual arrangement of being held in trust made the profit motive less pressing.  The emphasis, always, was on the quality of the work.  In my first four years working at The Day, the paper sent me to Russia twice to report and participate in an exchange program with Russian journalists. 

The luxury of such travel is mostly over for small newspapers, as is the financial ability to pay for large staffs. Instead, newspapers in the last 10 years have endured an economic hurricane, and it isn’t over yet. 

After The Day’s beautiful building is sold and the staff moves, my hope is that it lands in a space that will allow it to retain a real newsroom. One of the joys of working at a newspaper was the controlled chaos of the newsroom, the editors and reporters working on deadline in a space where eccentricity and professionalism co-existed — along with the typical irreverence of the daily meeting to decide on the stories for the front page.

One of the best depictions of the utter nuttiness that could prevail while putting out a daily newspaper is shown in this four-minute scene from the 1994 movie, “The Paper,” starring Michael Keaton, Glenn Close and Marisa Tomei. With the exception of a columnist firing a gun in the air to make people shut the hell up, I’ve witnessed any number of versions of this scene. 

Zoom meetings can never replace newsrooms, or that kind of atmosphere. 

My brother Seamus ended up staying in his county job for 35 years. I don’t think it satisfied him. But he made great friends at work who gave him joy and, at the end, crowded his wake. 

He would be happy that I took his advice all those years ago. For decades I did what I loved. I hope there is still room for that, no matter what other changes beset journalism.