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