Should we move the production teams to a different spot in the newsroom?
It seems logical that, if the new interactive copy editors are the digital hub of the newsroom, that they should be centrally located in the room, rather than in the corner. It also seems logical that, if the new interactive copy editors are also the voices of the newsroom most interacting with our online public that they might also be the people nearest the entrance to the newsroom, ready to interact with the real live public when it visits.
And how segregated within this room — if at all — does the new print team need to be to reinforce our plan to deal with print in isolation?
And how much does it matter? Especially in a newsroom where almost no one has permanent claim on any given desk?
If we do any one thing, let’s put the city desk and the online news desk closer together.
I agree with Jake. Let’s move the web production and city desk/breaking news desk closer together.
And for the sake of making a statement, I suggest a major rearranging of desks. It would make a bold statement about our intentions for both web and print.
I’d like to, at the very least, mush the ACES, news editors and rim editors together at one group of desks (maybe where Sports is now?) Instead of the assembly-line structure we have now, I’d prefer one where stories start at the central spot and move outward into the newsroom.
All good ideas. Rob, if we wanted to radically rearrange furniture, are there networking issues that limit our ability to do that?
It depends on how radical you want to get. We’d need to be somewhere near the ports themselves, but I have 500′ of Cat 5 cable downstairs and a lot of cable ends. We’d need to either do network drops from the ceiling (which needs Telecom approval) or route them over the floor via trip strips. (Or whatever they actually call those cable run floor things).
We have a couple of ports that have strobing issues, but Networking is closing in on a solution for that.
I agree that it’s important to move the ACES and the production desk closer to each other. There were a few Sundays as a news desk TA that I moved the copy desk up to near the breaking news desk. It seemed silly to have to hike across the room to check on the status of the one or two local stories moving that day. One thing I would suggest would be to make sure the student leadership ends up in the center of the new arrangement. I felt like it was important to see the students making the minute-by-minute decisions, and to have the editors around the edges for help and guidance, but not as the ones running the show.
As for the print operations, that back corner seems like a fitting place to keep it, since it’s near the color printer, the pagination computer, and Ron. (I don’t imagine you’d want to try to move Ron.) Of course, all those things are movable, so you could consider moving it into the photo bubble if you want to physically isolate it.
Speaking of the photo bubble, is there any reason to keep the photographers isolated? It might make for more recognition of visual opportunities if the photo reporters are mixed with the text reporters. Same goes for graphics reporters.
One point of Julia’s I want to touch on.
This summer, we’ve had the graphics designers in the newsroom. It’s good, since we see them, but it took me (and the reporters) forever to figure out who they were.
I think that’s the advantage of putting us in identifiable spots. There are probably better ways to do that, but it is something that we lose when we move photo, graphics, or any other department into a non-centralized location. In some ways, it could hurt collaboration because I don’t know who to talk to.