Join us on a walk

It’s 17 January 2018, 8:30 AM. We are about to enter the newsroom of Dagblad van het Noorden – a Groningen-based regional newspaper. It is a cold, dry winter day marked by beautiful lighting and subtle cloudscapes. As the sun rises and we observe how the janitorial crew makes way for journalists, we unpack our bags: a couple of film cameras, a gimbal, sound recorders, and a notebook. We scan through our notes that state the concepts we bring with us on this day that we are visiting the newsroom: Atmospheres, affordances, purpose-built design, daily routines. These concepts are an intimation of what we hope to research, where we ask: How do journalists of Dagblad van het Noorden experience, think through, and interact with their workspace?

We invite you to join us on a walk to trace how this group of journalists perceive, articulate, engage, embrace, challenge, are receptive to and give form to the 'atmospheres' of their workspace. Atmospheres is a central way in which we have looked at the newsroom and you can find more information on it here. On this walk, we explore the spatial, socio-cultural, rhythmic, tonal and somatic characteristics of Dagblad van het Noorden’s newsroom – through video, sound, text, and drawing. Employing artistic methods, we want to let you experience this newsroom together with us – giving you insight into the journalists’ lived experience of their profession as fundamentally interwoven with the idiosyncrasies of their workspace. 

Our host on the walk is online news editor Alfred Meester. He’s worked for regional news organisations since 1987 and joined Dagblad van het Noorden in 2002. Alfred now manages its digitalisation, while closely collaborating with print editors to gauge which content could be included in upcoming newspapers. Hoping to learn more about the interaction between the editorial staff and their workspace, Alfred walked us through the newsroom which we visited as part of the project Exploring Journalism’s Limits (funded by Dutch Science Council, NWO). Also joining us on this day is Ricky Booms, an visual artist invited to reflect on the space alongside us. Along the way, we encounter visual editors, interns, freelancers, editorial staff writers and the kinds of spaces that resonate with them. 

The walk takes approximately 45 minutes. You can read more on the background on the study and the newsroom below.

Orientations

Located in the North of the Netherlands, Dagblad van het Noorden was founded in 2002 as a merger of regional dailies Nieuwsblad van het Noorden, De Groninger Dagblad, and De Drentse Courant. Its headquarters in the southeast of Groningen is located in a building that used to be fully occupied by the newspaper, and is now a shared office space with other companies. The building is still under construction, though the space in which the newsroom is located was already renovated and redecorated in 2017-2018. This renovation meant a change from a more traditional architectural design of a printing house to open space offices. 

While both news work and the printing and dissemination of the daily newspaper originally took place at this location, it is now primarily a production house – run by publisher NDC Mediagroep. Instead of printing plates, binders and a functional mailroom, the print and online newsroom is now surrounded by the publisher’s sales department and customer service. But this is not to say that its days of yore are neglected: elements of the original printing house are integrated into the new architectural design, as are historical artefacts such as busts, paintings, and billboards.

The news work of Dagblad van het Noorden takes place in a layered workspace that affords a multiplicity of experiences, uses, practices, collaborations, hierarchies, trajectories, and memories. What is at stake, in and beyond this exposition, is the dynamic intersection between architectural design and those inhabiting these spaces. How do journalists interact with, appropriate and play with design? The spatial configurations of work practices in newsrooms are undergoing constant change, by refuting, refining and reclaiming traditional understandings of journalistic work (Tameling and Broersma, 2013; Le Cam, 2015). More and more frequently the newsroom is challenged as the dominant site for news production, by start-ups, collectives and other upcoming journalistic forms. At the same time, the newsroom is still an inhabited institution that points towards an ideological stand on what journalistic work can, might or should look like (Deuze and Witschge, 2020). 

In the interaction between the newsroom and its inhabitants it is important to note that though the architectural design of the newsroom might seem definite once built and decorated, the journalists’ lived experiences are dynamic and never at a standstill. The newsroom of Dagblad van het Noorden is designed with news work in mind, yet this is not to say that each employee experiences the space similarly, nor that they conceptualise journalism in the same way. 

Physical working environments – including their purpose-built designs and uses through everyday practices – have the potential to affect how journalists go about doing their work and perceiving journalism as such. But similarly, the practices, ideologies and other forms of meaning-making that take place within the newsroom contribute to the atmosphere of the newsroom. By critically engaging with what a newsroom can feel like, we take on Florence Le Cam’s (2015) call to researching the ideological and experiential implications of the spatial organisation of physical workspace.

In this exposition, we therefore ask the reader to, together with us, shift the gaze away from fixity and stasis, and instead towards indeterminacy, constant change and the in-between – in order to more fully grasp the experiential depths and doing justice to a diverse range of viewpoints. This multiplicity of perspectives is also reflected in our research team, which consists of makers/researchers and researchers/makers: Sander is a visual anthropologist who borrows research strategies from architectural design and artistic research; Saskia is a visual storyteller and art-director who recently re-entered academia; Tamara is a media scholar who focuses on creative research methods. Our collaboration is one of challenging disciplinary boundaries, welcoming new research strategies and embracing difference: our perspectives are intentionally interlaced with this exposition, whether this is textually, structurally or aesthetically.