“Conversation and competition turned newsrooms into incubators of great ideas,” said my friend David Israel, who was already, at 25, a must-read sports columnist at The Star when I met him. . .As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in the Times’ D.C. office. After working at home for two years during COVID, I was elated to get back so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop. But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels...
Dowd: Requiem for the newsroom
The Washington Post newsroom in 2017. Newsrooms have been shrinking and disappearing for a long time, of course, due to shifting economics and the digital revolution.
JUSTIN T. GELLERSON, STR / NYT"I don’t want this to be one of those pieces that bangs on about how things used to be better, and they’ll never be as good again.
But when it comes to newsrooms, it happens to be true.
“What would a newspaper movie look like today?” wondered my New York Times colleague Jim Rutenberg. “A bunch of individuals at their apartments, surrounded by sad houseplants, using Slack?”
Mike Isikoff, an investigative reporter at Yahoo who worked with me at The Washington Star back in the ’70s, agreed: “Newsrooms were a crackling gaggle of gossip, jokes, anxiety and oddball hilarious characters. Now we sit at home alone staring at our computers. What a drag.”
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