04.11.07
The workplace of the NYT’s future
Several years ago, when Donald Trump bought the home of my former employer to tear down for one of his new towers, the Sun-Times — which looked like a river barge run aground — was known far and wide as an eyesore, Chicago’s ugliest building.
Most of us didn’t want to move. We had not minded when the toilets backed up and fruit flies took up residence in the sports department around the desk of the turf writer, who inhaled fried chicken and missed the wastebasket with the bones. We hadn’t cared overmuch when our parsimonious publishers let the place turn into Dogpatch. Dowdy, ratty and roach-ridden 401 N. Wabash may have been, but it was also funky and full of memories, comfortable as a hog wallow.
The paper moved downriver to the Apparel Center of Chicago next door to the Merchandise Mart. The Apparel Center is so boxy and featureless that Sun-Times wags immediately dubbed it Chicago’s second ugliest building.
When we arrived, we were dismayed by the huge rabbit warrens of low cubicles marked by neutral colors. Our new home at 350 N. Orleans was sterile and soulless, at least in the beginning.
But as time went on, we got quite used to the new surroundings and had to admit it was easier to get work done there, even though no roll-top desks remained to shelter felons on the lam. There was plenty of elbow room and the faces were familiar. Most important, we brought our personal crap with us — you would not believe the artifacts that accumulate around newspaper people — and soon those cookie-cutter cubicles took on the trappings of home. It could have been worse, much worse.
These musings are spurred by the horrified reaction of media consultant Juan Antonio Griner on his blog to the new digs of The New York Times. I think he’s gone overboard. The new Times newsroom doesn’t look half bad to me — it resembles the new Sun-Times offices in the beginning: warrens for the inmates, glassed-in guardrooms for the straw bosses, recessed overhead lighting, sterile right angles, etc. etc.
What the photos on Griner’s blog don’t show is what happens to a newsroom after the journos move in. In this trade, the Pigpens vastly outnumber the Nancy Neats. Soon piles of yellowing newspapers, posters of sports teams and cartons of week-old doughnuts will funk up the joint just fine.
Timesmen and Timeswomen, you don’t need to worry.
[Correction: It turns out that the photos on Griner’s site are NOT those of the newsroom, though he said they were. See Times photographer Jacob Harris’ comment below.]
