Tossing a typewriter — at a reporter

November 4th, 2009 at 09:53am Linda Grist Cunningham

When I read this headline, I smiled — and then I was ashamed. After all, violence is never a good thing and beating up a coworker in the newsroom is the stuff of which firings are made.

Here’s the headline and the story to go with it: Washington Post’s”… Weingarten says hurrah to newsroom fisticuffs”

First of all, the word “fisticuffs” is just wonderfully delightful. Second, when all was said and done, this fight between two journalists was as much about their reporting and writing as it was about bad behavior. That much passion over the work one does is a good thing, a very good thing. Smacking around a coworker is not.

I am a child of old-fashioned newsrooms from the time decades before human resources people, legislation and victim-cultures took over the workplace. There was mostly nothing to like about those old newsrooms in which little counted except white and male. Woe be to the ones who were different. But, it was the way it was and we learned to cope, survive and thrive.

There was one good part and in today’s newsrooms it’s mostly gone, sandpapered out by the rules, the laws and the good intentions and righteousness of those who knew the workplace needed to change. Disappearing is the culture of the eccentric that drove the mythological uprisings in which journalists fought loudly and publicly over stories, sources, even the choice of words in a first paragraph. Rarely did we resort to fisticuffs, but the passion most definitely ran high.

We should say good riddance to the violence, of course. But, I am just a tad sad today knowing that gone is the eccentricity that made newsrooms ditsy, important places. The kind of places that drove one editor I know to toss a typewriter at a reporter because the reporter took his story assignment too casually and blew the deadline.

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