The windowless room where our reporters work is nicknamed the Echo Chamber. It’s a catchy phrase that is wrong on a couple counts.
Reporters here better not be mere echoes. They should bring context and fairness and accuracy and diversity and complexity and their own innate brains and knowledge to what they produce.
There is a difference between stenography and journalism.
The name is also wrong because the room doesn’t echo. Even when filled with working reporters it is almost silent.
A good thing about my job is that it lets me keep a hand in a career I pursued for more than two decades before moving to academia. As Echo and other Knight Center reporting initiatives have matured, I have enjoyed a small measure of practicing what I teach.
But the directed chaos of the newsrooms where I once worked is missing. Those were often filled with furious arguments, obnoxious joke-telling, juicy gossip, blaring police scanners, constant phone chatter, spontaneous story conferences, helpful advice, unhelpful advice and paper wads thrown upside the head.
Times change.
When I look across the Echo Chamber, I see mostly silent journalists glued to computers and phones. I doubt that’s a reaction to the boss sticking his head in the room. The Echo crew is not of the kind who need to fake concentrated effort.
Perhaps one explanation is the ubiquitous ear buds and headphones sprouting atop every staffer. Their presence feels isolating and perhaps dangerously anti-social.
But there is something else going on here. That newsroom cacophony remains. It just has gone online and intensified.
Between e-mail, blog posts, listservs, social media tools, Web sites and other venues, there is plenty of chaos for these journalists to wade through. This isn’t the idle newsroom chatter of times gone by. It is a conversation engaged in by ever-changing ideas of what constitutes a reporter, editor, source and news consumer. Sometimes what’s at stake is the very definition of a news story.
The journalism practiced in now quiet newsrooms is noisier than ever.
And while some of us try to figure out how to sustain quality journalism through all that noise, the chaos is reassuring. The more confusing things become, the greater the need for someone to help make sense of it all.
A physical newsroom may be an increasingly anachronistic nexus of newsgathering. But the chaos at the center of this profession remains. It’s greater than ever. You just can’t hear it.
So I don’t worry so much about the silence of the newsroom.
But if I was a reporter wired to ear buds and glued to a computer, I’d be plenty worried about an editor with a paper wad.
Echo Editor David Poulson is the associate director of Michigan State University’s Knight Center for Environmental Journalism
I am disappointed to learn that there were NO paper wads. What kind of editor are you?
Poulson, what you need are some team-building exercises. I recommend Mumball, laser tag, and karaoke to get started. Also, why doesn’t the J-School have a fully stocked minibar?
I’m telling you, add booze and games and you’ll get that newsroom vibe you’re looking for.
The article made me consider the chaos in our own mind and with our own need to exist.
David observes that the information chaos has found a more direct route to the brain of the new age writer-journalist. I suspect a new kind of brain process is taking over that requires less direct social contact and more emphasis on virtual context. I am thinking that the future for all of us is more information overload. Our fingers, tongues and word smiting methods cannot keep up with the demand of information flowing in the air around us now. As the next wave of energy comes over to sweep into our consciousness we become more droid and less human each day. Now more than ever we need to smell some roses and pet a cat and laugh with someone we like while touching our head with our own hand to remind ourselves of the connection we can still have with a nonvirtual experience. We need to pet ourselves to remember we are more than words, symbols and images. We need to touch the person next to us from time to time to remember we are first human and after that just thinking about it. Thanks for the opportunity to think about this silent yet raging chaos we have created. Zman
Dave, log onto Dungeons and Dragons online at any point during the day and you’ll find us a raucous bunch.
As you know, Dave, what I miss the most after leaving newsrooms is the conversation. Great post. Make them take the earbuds out though!
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