The smell of ink
The first thing you notice is that the building looks out of place. Situated in a downtown whose architectural heyday was the late Victorian period, the big tan box with the oversized windows was designed, inexplicably, by a California firm. In theory, all the windows were supposed to provide the public with viewing access to the news being gathered and written, with the biggest windows reserved for the press room. It was somebody’s lofty idea that our fellow citizens would come watch their newspaper being printed.
In reality, nobody ever did. The windows were usually foggy due to poor air circulation inside and the fact that no one ever cleaned them.
As soon as you entered the building, the strong smell of newspaper ink smacked you in the face like a wall of chemicals, burning your sinuses and catching in your throat. This effect was delayed if you worked after hours because you had to swipe your ironically named “access card” over and over until the magnetic lock on the door released, which could take a while, especially if it was raining. Many poor souls had to wait until somebody happened along and let them in.
The local newspaper was my first real adventure in the professional world. I worked there for 11 years, from 1986 until 1997, mostly in the newsroom. I started as an Editorial Assistant, answering phones and opening mail. Management believed in promoting from within, so I was fortunate to be able to move to different positions during my tenure. I ended up as a graphic artist, then copy editor and page designer on the desk (or “rim” as it’s called in the biz).
When a big story is breaking, the newsroom is the place to be. I remember the night the first Gulf War broke out in January 1991. Having just watched the first bombs being dropped on Baghdad on TV, the managing editor came out of the conference room and yelled, “Everything off the front!” as in, “forget the stories we decided earlier would be on A1; we’re now at war and that’s taking over the front page.” She was like a general giving orders to her troops in the field. I can even recall what she was wearing that night. She had an enormous soft heart for children and animals, but in the newsroom, she was a tough, no-nonsense woman who didn’t suffer fools. On any given day, I felt more secure when I looked up from my work to see that she’d arrived and was now in charge, though she always intimidated the hell out of me. I hated disappointing her and I knew I often did.
I was never a journalist myself – that requires a special breed of human and I could never have done that job – but nearly all of my closest friends were journalists and they amazed me with their tireless dedication, their resilience, and their brass balls. It can be a lonely, thankless job to report the news, so friendships nurtured in the newsroom are solid and long-lasting. Reporter or not, if you worked in the newsroom, you were well acquainted with dark humor, lousy coffee, and at least a few readers angry at the lot of you most of the time. One of our editors used to say, “If we’ve got both sides of the issue mad at us, we’re probably doing our job.”
If you worked in the newsroom, you were also acquainted with the swirling craziness and extra pressure of election nights, the battles with technology that didn’t work right too much of the time, and feeling foolish when you came into work and saw a big, fat typo in a headline. You felt simultaneously nauseated and especially foolish if you were one of the three or four people who proofread and approved that page the night before.
During my years in the newsroom, I had a front-row seat to watching how honorable journalism is done. I witnessed heated discussions as editors debated which angles of a story would best serve the readers. What did people really need to know? What was actual “news” and what wasn’t?
In recent years, it’s become popular sport to bash the collective media and blame them for everything that’s wrong with the world. And while there are media organizations that do not operate with integrity, I still get defensive because I have personal experience with a media organization for which getting it right for the right reasons was at its core. We made mistakes, as humans sometimes will, but we always admitted them and worked harder to get it right the next time.
Hundreds of quality people came and went from that big tan box over the years. Now the building stands empty and the property has been sold. Who knows what will ultimately stand there in the future? The heart of it isn’t a building on a plot of ground, though. The heart is the news reported, careers and friendships crafted, and too many quips and hilarious one-liners to remember.
The venerable Washington Post may have the profound “Democracy dies in darkness” as its slogan, but our reporters used to have their own sly, tongue-in-cheek slogan: “If it happens in Hagerstown, it’s news to us!”
