The New Newsroom

Abstract

The news has always been a public program. Before the printing press was invented, word of mouth was the primary source of news, gathered and distributed through pubs, inns and markets. The invention of the printing press brought an autonomy in news production, technology made the news more coherent, content controlled and regulated, ensuring that the same news travelled to more people. This, according to Victor Hugo, transferred the responsibility of conveying human thought from architecture to printing, from the book of stone to the book of paper, which was far more well traversed path in the city, through the form of an arcade, to renew its relevance within public life, while presenting an opportunity to increase its credibility by being in constant public view. Born out of industrial overproduction and new goods that flooded the market, arcades in 19th century Europe consolidate and put in public view the new products of industrial luxury. The symmetrical sky-lit interior street acting as a shortcut within the dense city blocks provided a way for the extension of public space on private property. While they were extensions of streets, with interior facades, signage, colours and lights of the commercial establishments, they were covered, protected from the weather, hence behaving like a public drawing room, where the collective lives, experiences, understands and invents. The New Newsroom utilises these architectural elements, incorporating them into a productive space; the shop windows look into podcast stations and screening rooms, benches along the interior façade act as social space, the street lights give a hazy domestic glow to the productive news floor, that acts as a constant backdrop to a frantic city life. solid and durable; and now to the book in the cloud, that is more permanent still through its physical absence. “This will kill that… Printing will kill Architecture”.1 The book of paper was still monumental, immortalised through its multiplicity. The power and autonomy of the press still ensured grand newsroom buildings, and tall skyscrapers where the paper was produced, that continued to be a prominent part of the public urban environment like the public halls of Fleet Street in London, the Hall of Inscriptions of the Chicago Tribune, and more recently, auditoriums and retail spaces in the New York Times, and event spaces and debate centres as part of the curated public program of the Guardian. In an era where we have multiple news sources, an overwhelming number of opinions through the social media, every tweet and Facebook post, considered news, goes onto the immortal web of the internet; the newsroom is not an autonomous organisation for news production. Though this allows for smaller organisations and different voices that occupy abandoned warehouses, former residential buildings ,the multiple contradictory outputs have caused the news to lose its credibility. The New Newsroom puts the gathering, productive and digestive spaces of the contemporary newsroom within the