It’s shortly before lunchtime Wednesday, and I am sitting alone at the metro desk, usually the busy hub of a buzzing newsroom. Today, it’s cold and dark — in order to save money, we turned off the lights and turned down the heat — and even the chatter on the police radio seems subdued.
Somehow, we’ve been managing to report the local news and publish the paper since public health authorities began advising people to work remotely and to stay home as much as possible. Although news is deemed “essential” by the government, this new pattern has brought a lot of changes to the ways we work.
First, of course, is the physical look of the newspaper. One of the immediate consequences of the stay-home order was the loss of most of our advertising revenue, forcing us to quickly reduce the size of the weekday papers to 20 pages in order to save costs. Although I hate this, I am at peace with it. Frankly, with the way the world has changed, we don’t have enough news to fill a four-section, 28-page paper. And although I know readers miss the larger paper, in particular the markets page, I have received many encouraging notes from customers thanking us for being out there, reporting the local news. Thank you so much. Your notes have meant a lot to us.
Other changes are happening behind the scenes. Since we are not seeing each other, we’ve been using a lot of “virtual meetings.” For example, our 10 a.m. news meeting is now a video chat. The purpose is the same — the editors discuss what our assignments are and what stories and pictures we will have ready for the next day’s newspaper. It works OK. The video always seems to freeze when someone says something critical, and I have to ask them to repeat themselves. On the bright side, I am getting acquainted with the editors’ pets — Kaya, Bodhi, Fluff, Finlay, Callie, Cameron and Jamie.
