NYT columnist publishes obituary of newsrooms – 05/02/2023 – Novo em Folha

The New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd was excited to return to the Newsroom after two years indoors due to the Covid-19 pandemic. But since last year, she has found the Washington location virtually empty – journalists are preferring to work from home.

The scene is unusual for her. Dowd started working at the NYT in the 1980s, a time when newsrooms were crowded with curious, loud, angry, smoking journalists. Spaces were portrayed this way in the films “All the President’s Men”, “Spotlight” and “O Jornal”.

This past weekend, Dowd published the “final obituary for the American Newspaper Staff.” “What would a newspaper film look like today?” he asks. “A bunch of people in their apartments, surrounded by sad plants, using Slack (messaging platform)?”

In her text, she recalls picturesque moments in newsrooms in the 20th century (and the beginning of the 21st). “It was a lot of gossip, jokes, anxiety and hilariously offbeat characters. Now we sit at home alone looking at our computers. What a bummer,” a colleague told her. Dowd agrees.

The columnist, who is 71 years old and writes about politics, culture and the international, quotes the words of Arthur Gelb, editor-in-chief of The New York Times, in the 1940s. “There was an overwhelming sense of purpose, fire and life: the the clattering rhythm of typewriters, pulsing in the newsroom upstairs, reporters yelling at copyists to get their stories.There was also the pungent smell of vice: a carpet of cigarette butts, writers who were part-time gamblers, gambling dice, brass spittoons and a glamorous movie-star mistress wandering around,” he wrote in his memoirs.

Also, in the 1970s, when she worked at The Washington Star, mice would occasionally run over keyboards, and at other times reporters would fly into a rage, smashing their typewriters or computers on the floor. This was all part of the “old glamour” of the newsroom.

Since last year, however, according to Dowd, the newsroom has only a handful of people, and the rows of desks and computers are always emptier. “Sometimes a larger group of journalists is drawn into a meeting over a plate of bagels,” he says.

Tidbits aside, the void in the newsroom is justified. “People have realized the completely amazing fact that you can publish a great newspaper from home,” says Dowd.

The NYT journalists union negotiates with the leadership that professionals have to go to the newsroom only twice a week. The administration has committed to a three-day-a-week policy this year, but wants to expand on that in the future. The leadership is concerned about “youth stagnation”.

Dowd, for example, notes that newer reporters prefer to interview their sources via text message or email. “One problem with this,” said Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, “is that if you interview someone in writing, that person has time to consider and edit the responses, which means that spontaneity, offhand, reckless, and amusing quotes are dead. “.

Dowd worries that the romance and alchemy of the Newsrooms is over.

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