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An inside look at the news room Close your eyes and try to imagine what the news room of The Citizen looks like. Don’t get scared. We won’t let Ben bite. Do you picture a loud room filled with hustle and bustle, phones ringing off the hook and hat-wearing reporters (with those pieces of paper that say press tucked in the side) talking briskly and wittily with a cigar-chomping editor-in-chief? If so, you are way off the mark and have probably watched too many movies. Today, as I’m writing this, the news room is a quiet place. Kevin Wandra and I are discussing the NFL playoffs. Kevin is trying to get me to admit that New England will cruise on Sunday, but I refuse to bite. We have long since turned off my iTunes playlist, which regaled us with everything from Dewey Cox to Depeche Mode, and are working on our weekly blogs. Everyone else has left the building. The phones are not ringing on a Friday afternoon - at least not up here - and nobody smokes anymore. Although I’d love for Cal to be like J. Jonah Jameson in the “Spider-Man” movies - chomping on a stogie and barking orders at scared, little interns. No scared, little interns around either. It’s just a normal office building, although there is a Bon Jovi poster behind Kevin’s desk (feathered hair and all), a Jackson 5 poster near John Thompson (who actually saw them on the Victory tour) and a dozen Red Sox and Patriots posters in my corner (thanks to my mother-in-law, a regular subscriber to the Sunday edition of The Boston Globe). It can get loud and crazy in here and though you wouldn’t now it by (and I think I speak for everyone when I call them this) our awkward looking mugs, but we can be a very wild and funny bunch. This is a place of gallows humor and we could probably make a couple of bucks as some “kids in the hall” type joke writers for late night shows. At least Bill Maher, as some of our humor can be a little HBO. On Monday, things will be busy. The pages we have to fill will be on our computers and the keyboards will be clacking as we write the stories you will read on Wednesday (earlier if you visit www.thecitizen.com regularly). The phones will ring as people try to jockey their way on to our pages and we, as a staff, wil meet and present everything we have collected since Friday. We look at photographs and we push for which stories we think are important (poking fun at each other along the way - because who really reads Names and Faces anyway?). Each week has a similar structure and by 5 p.m on a Friday, as we try to get our blogs up and make preview notes for the weekend sporting events, I take a look around at the office - the clutter on John Thompson’s desk, the maps around Munford’s - I am ready to close the book on another week and start helping write the next one. login to post comments | Michael Boylan's blog
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