If you’ve seen TV shows like Aaron Sorkin’s ‘The Newsroom’ or ‘The Morning Show,’ you probably think it is just like it is on screen; fast-paced, stressful, and deadline driven. Most of those descriptions would be accurate. However, when I worked at a national news station, most of the time we tried to make the best out of a boring day.
When I was growing up, the first visual presentation of a news room was portrayed in Tim Burton’s blockbuster film ‘Batman’. It was when we first meet reporter John Knox and photojournalist Vicki Vale. The scene opens with Knox navigating a loud and noisy press room with other reporters talking amongs themselves or on the phone. There is imagery of paper being thrown about in crumples and sounds of typewriters furiously typing. When I got older, the image of the newsroom changed again. I saw the film adaptation of ‘All the Presidents Men’, which is about Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Berstein breaking the Watergate Scandal. That’s where I first saw that newsrooms were not like the one I saw in ‘Batman.’ It was a big space, not too busy, but there were long rows of desks with typewriters, stacks of paper, and books. The above Pixabay image I dug up shows what I always believed newsrooms looked like back in the day.
Below is an picture I took of myself and my fellow news producer Joe. The way our newsroom worked was pretty relaxed. We did not hit the streets following sources to break the next big scandal. We stayed in the newsroom using the internet to find interesting stories we could report on. It was pretty mundane on the weekends, so that’s when we would be able to not take ourselves too seriously. Joe was the best at breaking the concentration of a busy newsroom. Many of us were so involved in getting our stories done, so Joe would then have random outbursts saying things like, “Panama!”, an ode to the Van Halen classic. It was moments like these when I was okay with not taking my job so serious.
The image below was generated using ImageFX. I used the prompt “New York”, “Times”, “journalists”, and “newsroom” to give you the image shown. It sort of looks like the stock photo, showing journalists and paperwork piling up on desks in a 1970’s style newsroom. What’s not shown is the subtle differences showing the human side of the journalists like in the stock photo.
The image of the journalist spacing out into the ether is not as realistic as the Pixabay image. The journalists in that image are reading newspapers, talking on the phone, and typing and writing. There is not a minute to waste on daydreaming when you are on deadline to get something published. What’s funny about the generated image is the boxes and piles of paperwork. I was thinking, “No wonder you have so much work to be done, you’re zoning out, not doing work.”
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