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Littwin: Comfort in the newsroom? That ain't right

By Mike Littwin, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published August 15, 2006 at midnight

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It's quiet.

Too quiet.

It's airy.

Way too airy.

It's my first day in the new building, and let me just say the newsroom is enormous. You don't have room just to stretch out. You have room to homestead.

This is wrong on so many levels.

Newsrooms are supposed to be cramped and uncomfortable - the kinds of places you can feel justified when you complain about them. Newsrooms are not supposed to look like a brokerage firm. They're supposed to look like, well, the old Rocky building, which I fondly look back on for what it was - a biohazard, with "carpet" that was once tested to show it had exactly the same half-life as top soil from Rocky Flats.

And now, as you may have heard, the city is building a new jail from the ruins of the old Rocky. I hope to visit whoever gets my cell.

But as I type this, I look around at the new digs - the yellow walls and the high ceilings and the natural light. I type while sitting on my designer chair, which came, honest to God, with its own set of instructions.

Like I said, wrong on so many levels.

Here's when I knew things were really strange. I asked for directions - yes, you need a map here - and someone said, "You take a left turn at the TV - the one that looks like a drive-in theater . . . "

These are words that, as far as I know, have never been uttered in a newsroom.

There was a time when there weren't TVs in any newsroom and there was no chance that you would have to see Bill O'Reilly's face.

And now? Let's just say people are lining up to work on Super Bowl Sunday.

What's most surprising about all this - I mean, beyond Editor John Temple's granite shower in his palatial office - is that newspapers are supposed to be dying.

I'm not a nostalgia guy. I'm not going to tell you stories of a time when reporters routinely kept a fifth in their bottom desk drawer or of editors who drank dinner between editions.

But I will say, the new stories aren't quite as engaging. I mean, the biggest story is of shrinking circulation at papers around the country and that no one under the age of 30 has ever touched newsprint.

And we all know about the growing prominence of bloggers, who don't even need an office, or columnist-sized expense account, to bring down Joe Lieberman.

And then there's the advent of something called "citizen" journalism. I'm not sure what it is, but it sounds almost as scary as "citizen" brain surgeon.

And yet. Here we are in a brand new building, which must be economically viable, because, I guarantee you, the owners didn't build it just so I could have a better view. (Yes, the building is being shared with the other newspaper in town, but the newsrooms are off-limits to anyone from the opposition. In fact, anyone caught violating that rule is sentenced to covering City Council meetings for a month.)

By the way, you can't beat this location, right across from the Civic Center. The staggeringly beautiful view from my desk includes City Hall, with the mountains as a backdrop. I can see the art museum and, even from this perspective, I still can't figure out what the new design is supposed to mean.

I can watch the people gathering on the Civic Center lawn, and, as it turns out, not all of them are involved in drug deals.

At the old building, my view was of the Holiday Inn, which I once mentioned in a column - only to get nasty e-mail from the management. Well, I hope they hear nicer things from the guys at the jail.

But a view is one thing. And it's another to work in a place where you have to worry you're going to spill coffee on the rug.

I did have a minor dust-up with an editor who will go unnamed (but her initials are DLG and she's the managing editor).

I brought many things here from my old office - what George Carlin calls your "stuff," the things that make your place feel like home. As Carlin said, "If you didn't have so much stuff, you wouldn't need a house. You could just walk around all the time."

I brought the photos of my loved ones - my wife and daughter, and one of me debating Mike Rosen. I've got a brochure from Cape Girardeau, Mo., for Rush Limbaugh's self-guided hometown tour. I've got a Marc Holtzman for governor bumper sticker and one for Dennis Kucinich for president. I've got an old column with "Litwin, you're an a------" scrawled across it. (OK, he had a spelling problem, too.)

And I brought my voting machine - yes, a genuine 2000 Florida voting machine, a Bush vs. Gore voting machine, and with genuine chads. I covered that post-election election, and my daughter bought the machine for me for a buck. By now, it's gotta be worth at least 20.

And when this editor saw the machine - with all its, uh, chipped-paint character - she complained it was not the "elegant, spare look" she expected for my work environment.

Yes, even editors can, with help, be funny.

I said it was a piece of history. She said it was a piece of junk.

I countered that this very voting machine is what makes a newsroom a newsroom. Somehow, I won the debate. Maybe this is what clinched the argument: I promised I would never spill my coffee on it.