Media: Gone gone gone are the old newsrooms.

 Maureen Dowd's column in the N.Y. Times got me thinking about newsrooms I've worked in during my 50 year career in Radio & TV Newscasting:

Mike Isikoff, an investigative reporter at Yahoo who worked with me at The Washington Star back in the ’70s, agreed: “Newsrooms were a crackling gaggle of gossip, jokes, anxiety and oddball hilarious characters. Now we sit at home alone staring at our computers. What a drag.”

 

Read her entire column HERE. IF you have Times access.

     This photo shows part of the newsroom at WERC Radio in Birmingham, where I worked for a decade, including time as News Director.

     I wish I had an audio track to go with that photo, and a little bottle of air, so you get a sense of the room's scents.

     The newsroom Maureen's column paints was certainly larger than the little WERC cubbyhole room above the Pasquales Pizza place on 2nd Avenue North...and one of the newsroom scents would have been the pizza ovens from one flight downstairs. Another would have been Jesse Champion's pipe...and my cigarettes.

(From Top left: Bob Rowe, me,

Jesse champion)

     

 

 The audio, if you could hear it, would have been a mix of the ever-present police radio scanner, a TV station on low, and the constant banter of a roomful of people typing and talking about...everything....sometime even the stories we were working on.