Those Were the Days

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The Newsroom of Yesteryear

“There was so much passion. It was tangible, palpable and visible. The joke was always, ‘I tried to date civilians and it didn’t work.’ The civilians didn’t understand that when a story broke, you were going to leave the theater, you weren’t going to make it home to dinner. That translated into a lot of steaminess: We’re all in this together, and we only have each other. . . . Newsrooms always felt like an episode from the old ‘M*A*S*H’ television show, a group of passionate people doing difficult jobs under pretty impossible circumstances, and the only way they survived was doing it a little bit wacky.”

—Jacqui Banaszynski, a Pulitzer-winning reporter,
in Carl Sessions Stepp’s article, “A Eulogy for Old-School Newsrooms,”
American Journalism Review, Winter 2009

Editor’s Note: My well-spent youth. Today’s newsroom: Alone, in your jammies, at the kitchen table? Man! I’m really old.