'A machine for informing'
Beneath all the words, the news is still an industry
For several decades now - well predating the World Wide Web - the most common image of the newspaper workplace has been the near-antiseptic purity of the modern newsroom: an open plan beneath fluorescent lights, surrounded by glass-walled offices.
The very model of a white-collar, post-industrial job site, that image was popularized by the film version of "All the President's Men" (1976). The clean, well-lighted place of The
Anyone who's ever worked at a newspaper knows just how misleading such a scene is. Oh, it's accurate enough, so far as it goes. But that image contrasts with another reality, the reality of how a newspaper as an actual, physical item - all smudgy ink and smooth newsprint - is manufactured. In its loud, messy, assembly-line way, that reality is no less dark and obdurate than Watergate was, but far more productive and enduring (endearing, too).
The fundamental fact of the newspaper workplace - even today, as circulations shrink, revenues decline, and online future increasingly becomes online present - is that this workplace is an outpost of industry: a factory that produces a tangible, hold-it-in-your-hands product 365 days a year.
Go deep enough inside a newspaper building and what you find isn't a shiny information-age showplace that looks like a laboratory or law office. What you find is something closer to River Rouge then or much of southeastern China now: a citadel of abundant thing-ness, solid, metallic, full of hard, purposeful objects.
A newspaper, still, is more plant than office, a place of rivets, valves, ducts, buckets, spattered ink, sans-serif warnings, gear shafts, chutes, cables (big, fat ones - not the piddly kind that connect to computers), grime, forklifts, vents, pipes, rollers, and, of course, lots and lots of paper.
Le Corbusier called a house "a machine for living." Well, a newspaper building is a machine for informing. Soon enough that will change. The machine's basement will be emptied and shut down as the soft click of send buttons makes obsolete the humming roar of the presses.
The funny thing is, from a strictly technological point of view, a newspaper - the product of all this mass of machinery - remains a technological marvel. It's random access, highly portable, easily divisible, surprisingly durable, profitably recyclable, proudly multipurpose (can't use a BlackBerry to clean up the cat litter!), and requires no power source.
Writing in his great poem "Paterson" about the first planned manufacturing community in America, William Carlos Williams offered this motto, "No ideas but in things!" For now, at least, there are no newspapers but in these mechanical things, either. The romance of a newspaper, and it remains considerable, is three-dimensional. "Stop the presses"? Not quite yet, anyway.
Mark Feeney is a member of the Globe staff. He can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com. Scott LaPierre is a member of the Globe staff. He can be reached at slapierre@boston.com. To see more photos, go to boston.com/ideas. 