Newsroom truth: first we procrastinate

The Daily Bulletin after the move. Photo: Wes Woods.

Over last weekend, the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin became the latest Los Angeles News Group newspaper to downsize to smaller digs. (They sit in Rancho Cucamonga.) In his column about the move, and about his personal process of packing up, columnist David Allen speaks to a lot of the truths about the print journalist genus.

Sample:

Before we could move, we had to pack.

And before we packed, we had to procrastinate.

There was official encouragement all summer to begin clearing out files and paper, but I don’t know that anyone, even the bosses, were serious about it until October.

That’s kind of our approach to putting together a newspaper. Give us a deadline and we’ll do our best to meet it, but we’re not going to get started until absolutely necessary.

[skip]

There was a lot to do. One trait of journalists is that we accumulate a lot of paper. Press releases, printed emails, printed Google Map directions, agenda packets, newspapers, notebooks, business cards and notes to ourselves tend to stay where they’re left, and grow.