As Gretel prepared to leave town, she told me about her new newsroom. When she walked through it, to meet the staff she would soon join, she saw the room with fresh eyes. She couldn’t see the ghosts.
And I thought, yes. Sometimes to move on is to free yourself of the memories, the stories and the faces.
Yet I can’t free myself.
When I walk through my newsroom, where I have worked for 16 years, I see all the wonderful people who have left. Most have gone on to do great things. Most are happier for having departed. So it’s probably not fair to call them “ghosts.”
Still, they are ghosts to me. I hear a low, deep voice and turn my head, thinking it is Vernon, the editor who recruited me to Dallas. I see someone hunched over a computer keyboard and suddenly want to talk to Bill, the writer who inspired me. I watch a photographer rush out of the building with her cameras, and I want to call out to Judy, who pushed me to become a more compassionate journalist.
I walk into the conference room where we hold our news meetings, and I see all of us there, grim-faced on a September morning in 2001. I pass an empty office and see myself laying off people on my staff, knowing that I will never be the same. I see friends who have come and gone, and recognize the places where we laughed and cried and fell in love.
As with most newsrooms, the past few years have been the hardest for ours, as we’ve lost hundreds of people.
And the pundits can write about how this is part of an historic transformation. They can write about how the news industry is just one of many going through seismic change. But on the human scale, this is a story about personal loss.
The cynic reminds us that journalism has been and always will be a business. But we know that newsrooms are like families, as dysfunctional as they may be. We know that most of us joined this family out of love, not just to pull a paycheck.
That’s why I still see the ghosts, I told Gretel.
She had worked in my newsroom for several years. Strangely enough, it wasn’t until she became a freelance writer that I became her editor. And now she was leaving for a good job at a newspaper on the West Coast.
And so there is sorrow in our newsrooms. Why can’t we be honest and take a moment to admit that?
But there’s also a resolve, there must be, for us to carry on: to honor those who have left, to mentor the younger journalists brave enough to join us. And, most of all, despite the odds, to preserve our capacity to care.
