A Love Letter to the Newsroom
Newsgathering takes place outside the building. But the magic happens inside.
I thought I could wait until they tore it down.
Some time next month, the City of Dothan will knock down the old Dothan Eagle building at the corner of Troy and Oates streets. Even the most uninformed will see the symbolism.
I planned to go downtown to see the demolition, snap a picture or two, and then come back to write a post about the memories.
However, I started this Substack as a way to write things that are at the front of my mind.
And this has occupied a good portion of my brain since I spoke to a local reporter last week about the planned demolition.
Newsgathering takes place outside the building. But the magic happens inside.
Nothing will replace the exhilaration of riding back to the office after a slam-bang interview, knowing you have a great story if you can just put down in a few words what you’ve gathered in volumes along the way.
Occasionally a photographer is in the car with you. Sometimes a deadline looms very soon.
Our building had two employee entrances. One was on the Oates Street side, just a few steps from the public entrance. It led to a long, narrow hallway that ended near the press and the mailroom, where you took a left and went up a flight of stairs. The other entrance was on the Troy Street side, where our dock was located. From there, you walked through the mailroom and took a right to the stairs.
Once out of the car, the anticipation built even more. You hustled up the stairs and opened the door to the newsroom. On the left were the executive offices, affectionately dubbed the “Warren Wing” after a publisher who spent extravagantly on the addition when newspapers were flush. Accounting was on the right. Inside those offices, ladies worked to get delinquent advertisers to pay their bills.
That opened into the newsroom — one long cauldron — at least back in the day.
Sports was lined against the wall to the left, consisting of five desks when I first came to Dothan, plus a layout and design station. The news desks were mostly in the middle, other than two lifestyle desks and a special sections desk, plus another layout and design station.
We had so many reporters back then that our Fort Rucker reporter’s desk was a chair and an end table. The rest of the middle included city and county reporters, education and police reporters, obit and general assignment reporters, and the city editor. Three layout and design stations filled out the rest.
In the back were two graphic artist stations and two photographer desks. The third photographer station was located in the dark room, to the right. Our editorial page editor and managing editor offices, along with a conference room, finished out the right side of the room.
The first stop was usually at the city editor's desk. A one- or two-sentence statement about the story would do. That was usually enough to convince the city editor to walk you over to the managing editor to discuss the story and determine whether the story needed to go on Page 1A, the inside local front (1B), or just inside somewhere.
Meanwhile, the photographer skipped into the darkroom to see what he had. The managing editor would then call over the layout editor and a graphic artist to discuss how to visually illustrate the story I was about to write.
The rest of the newsroom knew when you had something big. It was palpable. After a brief discussion with the managing editor, you scurried back to the computer to write the first 30 words, the most important words of your entire 500-word story.
If you got that part right, you were off to the races. I always loved writing on deadline. It came from my time as a sports writer. Several late evening Alabama football kickoffs often meant turning around a game story, notebook, and sidebar in an hour or less.
Soon, the photographer would pop out of the darkroom with “the” photo for 1A. Our graphic artist would create an info box or something more elaborate to go along with the story. The layout editor would leave a hole on 1A and make sure there was space for the rest of the story on an inside page.
This synergy between reporter, photographer, designer, graphic artist, and editor is adrenaline-inducing, especially when it all has to be put together in a matter of a few minutes.
It’s over in a blink. The story has been written and edited, the info box has been completed and put on 1A along with “the” photo. Minutes later, it is sent downstairs (literally via dumbwaiter when I first got here) to be placed on the page by union labor and readied for the press.
It wasn’t that way all the time. In fact, the super adrenaline-inducing stories were rare. Many times we just trudged back from the local council meeting with a routine story about a man showing up to complain about his neighbor’s high weeds. And many times we complained about the assignments to cover over-reported people and locations.
But when we did get a story, what a ride. All in one newsroom. All in just a few minutes.
Over time, the Warren Wing offices were all vacated. Accounting and billing were outsourced. So was circulation. And graphics. And layout. And the press.
The newsroom of 34 that existed when I came here in 1996 was 10 when I left in 2019, and it is a good bit smaller now. Even still, we have journalists doing their dead-level best to give you what they can with the resources they have.
I’ll share more individual stories about the newsroom when they tear it down. I’ll talk about the people who made going to work fun. I’ll talk about the time someone’s ashes wound up in our newsroom, about the silly games we played waiting for the press to run, about the traditional pizza of election night, and about the time the New York Times wanted to interview us.
I just wanted this piece to be about the feeling a journalist feels when a team comes together to make a news story worth reading.
All in one building. It can’t be duplicated.
Wow. This stuff really interests me. Thank you for taking us to ‘the inside world of journalism’. Looking forward to ‘the next edition’. Thanks, Lance.
Reminds me of Clark Kent and Lois Lane, but what you are up to these days makes you more like Superman.
A fisher of men….great article.