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The pandemic drove journalists out of their offices. Many people will never return. “A profession once rooted in place can now seemingly be done anywhere with decent Wi-Fi and the ability to improvise,” Ruth Margalit writes. Some financially strapped outlets are letting go of their leases permanently, and there will be much more lost than physical space, Margalit observes: the off-the-cuff praise, the little pep talk, the transparency that comes with presence. Michele Matassa Flores, the executive editor of the Seattle Times, tries to check in with her staff regularly. “But it’s more time-consuming and less satisfying and just harder to do that from home,” she says. “Every day I feel the weight of not doing that very well.” Her newsroom is closed until at least early 2021; Matassa Flores anticipates that many of her colleagues will opt to stay remote. “There’s a whole subterranean part of this, which is about collaboration and mentoring and the psychological impact of working in isolation,” she says. “Those things we’re just beginning to see.”
In the same way that newspapers once erred in assuming that going digital meant simply posting print articles online, a report by the International News Media Association finds that managers are in danger of believing that “remote news operations can thrive with a simple shift of where desks are located.” Young journalists, currently missing out on the formative experience of working alongside senior colleagues, face a towering hurdle. Margalit meets Alex Andrejev, a twenty-four-year-old who took a job as a sports reporter at the Charlotte Observer in January. “You have to go out of your way a little more to get that sense of mentorship,” Andrejev says. “It’s easy to feel lonely.”
––Betsy Morais, managing editor
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