AFTER DEADLINE
Newsrooms have changes but they haven't changed

By John Windrow

The down-deep nature of newsrooms seems impervious to change, despite endless advances and innovations in journalism.

This despite the obvious fact that major, irreversible changes have occurred.

The technology, for example, has changed tremendously since I started. I hate to date myself, but I remember when a bunch of dorky guys with pocket protectors and thick glasses carried in the first newsroom computers we used in San Antonio, Texas.

The parsimonious editors (some things never change) had bought a second-hand computer system on the cheap from a major local retailer. When the dorky guys turned the computers on for us, the green screens lit up and greeted us with "Good morning, K-mart shoppers."

Or take color printing. I never envisioned a paper that has the superb photo reproduction of The Advertiser.

And it's all not just a bunch of white guys doing the real news anymore, with a few women doing food, society, fashion and advice to the lovesick.

Not to mention the newspaper online. "What?" I said. "We're gonna give the paper away? Are you guys on Mars?"

But for me, after more than 20 years, the basic forces that drive newsrooms and the types of people who occupy them remain as fixed as stars in their orbit.

Daily deadline pressure; starting new with all those blank pages every day; hard-nosed editors; big-ego reporters; copy editors who throw themselves on swords over the distinction between who and whom; hustling photographers; sports types who seem like kids in a treehouse; the frenzied chaos of big news days that makes us wonder how we'll ever get the paper out; the lazy lulls of slow news days that make us wonder how we'll ever get the paper out; office politics, and — beneath the hard-boiled facade that news people wear like a crown — the soft-soap sentiment and camaraderie that always surface when times are tough.

I have worked in newsrooms in Texas, Missouri, Germany and Minnesota. (After just a few days in Hawai'i, I realized I would never miss Texas summers, Missouri winters, German popular music or Minnesota food.)

Part of my mission here is to work with the O'ahu bureaus and reporters James Gonser, Rod Ohira, Will Hoover, Eloise Aguiar and Suzanne Roig. They are as fine a bunch of pros as I have ever known.

I try to get out with them as often as I can, meet the people we write about, see the places, hear people's concerns first-hand. Even after six years here, many things just leap out at you. The stunning geography, the rich color everywhere, the open-hearted people, the sense that Honolulu is more like a big town than a city, how it feels safer and friendlier.

It's amazing just how local the local communities and neighborhoods are here. Every area seems to have such a strong, well-defined sense of place. You see it in how people always ask each other where they went to high school.

It's not like the endless Mainland suburbs and freeways, where everything seems homogenized and lost in Mall Land.

Makiki, where I live, is drastically different from Lanikai or Kalihi. Makaha in almost no way resembles Mo'ili'ili. Kahuku and Waikiki could be on different islands. So could Hale'iwa and Chinatown. It makes what we do in the O'ahu bureaus pretty challenging to try to give an accurate report of what's going on in all these places.

I have noticed something else here, an attitude on the part of readers that seems to have faded on the Mainland in urban areas of comparable size.

People expect the newspaper to respond to them personally, to take them seriously as individuals. I can tell it in the phone calls I get in the office and the people I meet when I'm out and about.

The readers know people I work with, ask about them. And they have a sense of ownership. If they don't like something, the way a story was played, for example, they will say something like "What are you doing to MY Advertiser?" Or "Why wasn't that obituary in MY Advertiser?"

I answered the phone in the city room early one Sunday morning and the caller told me she had been a subscriber for 40 years. She had lost her glasses, the lady said, and she asked me to read her the day's TV listings.

So I did.

I thought it was great that she would assume I would help her.

I think in most places, the biggest newspaper in the state is seen as some type of institutional monolith, something faceless and bureaucratic, where the reader would have a hard time finding someone to genuinely address his concerns.

From the people I meet and talk to here, I really don't think The Advertiser is viewed like that.

I hope we can keep it that way.

John Windrow is an assistant city editor for The Advertiser. Reach him at jwindrow@honoluluadvertiser.com.