JPod – I hadn’t heard the Seattle Times story. I do love this journalistic fixation with the idea that banning the display of bias in this or that area of life will eliminate bias in actual reporting. The best example are bans on campaign donations. It’s believed that reporters who are prevented from giving money to their favorite candidates will, through the magic of transference, also stop being biased in their reporting. So the reporters at the Seattle Times are prevented from clapping in anti-Bush fashion. The net result on coverage will be, What? Nothing of course.

But actually, what I wanted to discuss was something entirely different. I’ve never really worked in a newsroom for an extended period of time, just a few internships and the like. But I’ve been visiting them ever since I was a little kid. And in a way they were magical and sacred to me. My Dad used to bring me to the office all the time and he often worked in or adjacent to newsrooms, not just because so many of the ancient hacks toiling away liked to show me magic tricks and the like. I loved the chaos of newsrooms: The loud wire machines spilling out the AP or Reuters feed, the yelling from one desk to another, the banter and, perhaps most of all, the typing. The din — never mind the musk! — of the newsroom was authentic, American and enviable, at least to me. This was a place I could spend a life.

But now when I have occasion to visit newsrooms, I find them depressing places. The smell of cigarettes is completely gone. Nobody is drunk from a long liquid lunch and no one is hungover from such a lunch that extended through dinner. Odds are staffers are eating macrobiotic muffins with plain yogurt for breakfast and tofu sushi for lunch. The smell of pastrami is greeted as an affront rather than a sign it must be Tuesday. People look healthy. Worse, the noise is gone. The wire machines are no longer constantly rat-a-tat-tat-buzz-dinging. There are no typewriters. The rooms are so oppressively quiet they have a certain weak-tea Orwellian Office Space feel to them. You have hushed conversations because, now, there’s every possibility people can hear your conversations (which means no dirty jokes).

Again, these are just my impressions, I don’t actually work in newsrooms, I merely visit them semi-frequently. But I’ve worked in plenty of boring, normal offices, and that’s pretty much what newsrooms feel like to me. Just another boring, normal office. And that’s the kind of place I never wanted to work in.