Are face-to-face newsrooms dead? Yes, thanks to new technologies the news media no longer need the huge, noisy, colorful and bureaucratic newsrooms of the past. The covid has shown it. Long-distance journalistic work is not something new. Correspondents in foreign countries have always been “lone wolves” although they often stayed in other people's newsrooms so as not to lose contact with the buzz of the news and the company of colleagues.
But those newsrooms where you smoked, drank, and even slept, left never to return. They were organizations based on “assembly lines” where only reporters stepped onto the street and, from the scene of the events, dictated by telephone chronicles that others wrote, edited, corrected, designed and sent to workshops.
Many of these old reporters who "were on the streets" almost never set foot in the newsrooms and, in fact, knew better the police stations, the morgues and all the gambling dens in the cities than their own newsrooms. In those newsrooms there was more “manufacture” than “mindfacture”, the result of a very traditional industrial process based on own sources and others: reporters and agency teletypes.
Making a newspaper was somewhat anarchic and that is why some directors confessed that "during the day my newsroom is a libertarian commune, but at closing it becomes a dictatorship where the only one in charge is me." Those who are nostalgic for the past forget that the “editing councils” were endless, and that is why the “Japanese-style” meetings in Le Monde were surprising with all the attendees standing.
In German newspapers, newsrooms were like compounds between academics and hoteliers: collections of individual offices with locked doors and “do not disturb” signs. I got to know a Soviet newsroom that operated in an old brothel where journalists occupied the same dens, with cots and seedy bathrooms: the keys to each cubicle were kept at the reception of the newspaper, and every night the offices were sealed to guarantee secrets and exclusive.
In London, the Fleet Street pubs were extensions of many newsrooms. In Dublin I remember that opposite the Irish Times office was the bar where the "Irish coffee" was invented. In Bangkok's first refrigerated newsrooms, its journalists combated the torrid and humid summer heat by napping on mats next to each table.
In Caracas, until there was no air conditioning, the "ferragosto" was fought with a semi-nudism: "we went in panties and they in underpants" explained one of their journalists.
Julio Alonso, who was deputy director of El País, recounted that in the 1970s he worked at ABC in Madrid, when he still occupied a traditional Sevillian mansion on Calle Serrano. “I used to arrive at six in the evening and sit at a long table chaired by the editor-in-chief of Internacional. In front of him he had a typewriter and two trays, one full and one empty: in the full one were the teletypes of the day that I had to review. He selected the most relevant offices and edited them by hand. He deposited them on the empty tray and a meritorious man would pass them on to the chief editor, and he would send them to the layout. As soon as he arrived, the ABC maitre d' would recite to me the "specials" of the night. Today I recommend Don Julio gazpacho, sautéed vegetables and grilled grouper. The usual wine? I would go to work and after half an hour my dinner would arrive. That lasted about two hours. Finished everything and dined like a gentleman, I got copies of the Times of London, and Journal de Genève and, no later than nine at night, I left for home, where I finished my day reading those great newspapers.
This type of covens made newsrooms exotic places, which are suitable for memoir books, but which are unrecognizable in the new open, glass-enclosed, integrated and multimedia newsrooms where today you don't hear typewriter keyboards or thunderous teletypes.
Now there is a proliferation of journalists with headphones, silent television screens, computers that are less and less fixed and more and more portable; few meetings, many at a distance; individual offices have become large shared rooms, and exclusive cubicles have given way to “hot tables” waiting for the first comer.
Other changes have been the 24/7 newsroom hours compared to those night owls that were deserted in the morning and barely started in the middle of the afternoon, only to close at dawn. It also ended with the discrimination between pens, model makers, foteros and pintamonas that today operate integrated as what they are: multi-media journalists.
Telecommuting is here to stay, but personal interaction will never go away. Newsrooms will be less numerous, bureaucratic and gregarious, but personal contacts, creativity, planning, debate and self-criticism will continue to be more necessary than ever. Because both in newspapers and in good restaurants, kitchens and chefs must work together to make the best "proximity journalism" possible. And that requires having more journalists on the street than in the newsrooms.
That is the future: hybrid newsrooms of “fishermen and cooks”, in restaurants open 24 hours a day for more diners than ever around the world.
