WaPo newsroom redesign: No room for reporters?

Posted by Leah McBride Mensching on December 15, 2009 at 4:57 PM

The famed Washington Post newsroom of Woodward and Bernstein is no more, and in its place is a redesigned one. However, if the famed Watergate reporters found themselves trying to type up a story there today, they may have to borrow an editor's desk to do so.

After months of renovation in the Washington Post's newsroom, reporters are returning to find that two-thirds of the floor space is devoted to editors, while reporters' desks are barely large enough to hold a "notebook, phone and a few files," The Washingtonian's Harry Jaffe reported yesterday.

The gutted newsroom, before the redesign. Photo: Ian Shapira

Expecting to find a newsroom of the future, reporters are now complaining to editors, who now must worry about where to put reporters in addition to circulation and advertising woes, Jaffe wrote, terming the situation "desk envy."

The Post has planned to complete its merger of print and Web by January - as of late, print reporters were in the newspaper's headquarters in D.C., while online content creators were in a separate building, across the river in Arlington.

Earlier this month, Ian Shapira ruminated about whether the newly designed newsroom would "retain the same junky, homey feel" generations of reporters had experienced. Based on Jaffe's description, it seems unlikely eccentric reporters will "get to keep their fake palm trees, the towering mounds of old newspapers they call their 'filing system,' their decades-old collections of unopened mail."

Although now junk and clutter free, creators of the newsroom of the future apparently forgot to include room for the reporters.