Copyright 2007 Ben S. Pollock
One should know one’s surroundings well, or try to. In most of the U.S., where owning your house is expected, renting causes a different appreciation for the place (so I can’t speak for a place like Manhattan). Even if you’ve fully unpacked in a rental, the feeling of unsettledness always is there. Even if being evicted is less likely than foreclosing on an owned home, you’re in someone else’s place when you rent.
Newsrooms generally are owned and being commercial property a long-term lease is nearly the same as that permanency (could expand from above on rent and mortgage both being tenuous). The personality a newsroom has is drawn from its literal concrete and steel foundations. Except for one, none I have seen is tidy. The old Arkansas Gazette was either immaculate or displayed fatal arrogance. I hope, should it come, to gauge my possible happiness by the feel of a newsroom; for example the Des Moines Register one afternoon in the mid-1990s felt like the accounting office of lemmings. But that is a lot like a first date: Honor your first impression but know it has to be just a guess.
Newsrooms in rented spaces, I now realize, do carry enough personality to say something. The Arlington, Texas, office of The Dallas Morning News, which I visited in 2005 to see a friend, sits on some warehouse parkway. It has a press, and that area is efficient. The newsroom is far, far bigger than its relatively few occupants — and that must have been before any staff cutbacks — and having cubicle partitions seemed unnecessary, like a cluster of Pacific atolls whose occupants also dug moats.
My newsroom is a satellite, holding some 50 news, business, sports and photography folks to cover the Ozarks for the Little Rock paper. For its first six or seven years it lived in a Springdale strip mall next to a Laundromat. Across the parking lot was a pizza take-out place and a used office furniture store. To the south and north were used car lots. Across the highway was a Sam’s Club. Enough said, at least for now.
Two years ago it moved to a little town just north, Lowell, to have half the ground floor of one of three new, low brick-and-glass office buildings. Another rental. Its personality just comes from us. We’re all grateful for the shiny modernness. Being not ours, we take care not to mark or mar it up.
It has a break room. The story we’re given is we could have installed a sink or more of a kitchenette but it was felt that might encourage messiness, with dozens of young adults taking turns at the microwave and pulling things from the refrigerator. Crumbs and spills inevitably accumulate, with no way to clean but to schlep wet paper towels from the restrooms down the hall.
The summer before last, grills were brought to the tidy parking lot so we could fashion a just-us cook-out, separate from the annual company picnic, held in a different month at the press building a block away (that the company owns, or long-term leases). The picnic is the only explanation for the newsroom break room to own two discount-store butcher knives. They’re 10 and 12 inches, fairly thin stainless blades with plastic handles and no attention to balance. They’d scare me to try to use, even with a counter, a carving board and a bowl for scraps.
But reporters and editors use knives best left to reading about in crime stories set in trailer parks to cut birthday cakes with.
The two to 15 times a day I go in for coffee or food-makings I see one or both knives, usually still crusted with icing from last week, on the table or shelf. Newsrooms have few visitors, but if a stranger came in and saw big knives used for halving a doughnut, wouldn’t he think, isn’t that just like journalism overkill?
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