Newsrooms Past

I only briefly worked for a newspaper, a tiny weekly in Virginia after my U.S. Army service. But the radio newsrooms I worked in during the 70's had a feel similar to the print newsrooms described in a Friday piece by Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times titled "The best damn job in the whole damn world." The newsrooms I worked in were noisy, smokey places filled with foul language and shouting. They were terribly exciting to be in when news broke, and sometimes even when it didn't. I just read what I've written, and perhaps some explanation is needed for younger readers:

• radio stations used to have actual news departments. At one point in Birmingham there were ten people working in one station's newsroom, actually gathering news and breaking stories...though even then the newspapers broke most of it. I remember getting my Birmingham News one late afternoon* and seeing the story of a wealthy woman murdered in one of the mansions on Red Mountain**. She had been found dead in her bed by her maid, and the family's black-sheep son was the suspect. It was a really big story and I had missed it. I was kicking myself all week. We actually did compete with the papers back then. Really.

• They were smokey because smoking was allowed. Hell, it was almost encouraged. You smoked even if you didn't. If anybody had a bottle of liquor in their bottom desk drawer I never saw it. But it wouldn't have shocked me. And don't ask me about the DJ's down the hall.
• The newsrooms were noisy because everyone typed on electric, or in some cases (RIP Jesse Champion) manual typewriters. The Associated Press wire machine typed out its stories almost endlessly, as did another machine from the National Weather Service. There was a police scanner blaring the 20 or so channels in use in the Birmingham area. And when you needed a background fact for a story, you generally shouted across the room to see if anyone had the answer. There was a TV on too, mercifully with the sound turned down till a newscast came on. Everyone was talking on the phone and, of course, we also had the radio on!

[The photos: that's News Director Bob Rowe (l) and I (r) in the top photo, and Jesse Champion, Sr. smoking the pipe in the lower one, all in the WERC Newsroom, late 1970's]

* The Birmingham News used to be the afternoon newspaper. Then they renegotiated their joint-operating agreement with the Birmingham Post-Herald in 1996 and moved to mornings. That allowed the News to survive, at least till now, and allowed the Post-Herald to die, later, in 2005.

One of the Post-Herald's greatest reporters was Capitol Correspondent/columnist Ted Bryant, who died a decade ago this June 30th. Ted was an occasional guest on For The Record. If you read the Ebert piece linked at the top of this posting, you can easily imagine Ted fitting right in to the Sun-Times newsroom culture, though he would have done it with a distinctly Southern accent.

** Was that the Virginia Simpson murder? I've searched under every place I can imagine and can't find details it anywhere...especially in my brain!