The Newsroom in the age of Coronavirus
The Old Newsroom
What a difference a week makes.
Were we too slow?
Weren’t we paying attention?
Should we have been on this weeks ago?
We are 3 decades late on Climate Change.
Are we 3 weeks late on COVID-19?
Time will tell.
What we do know is that last week Santa Monica College (SMC) and the SMC Corsair newspaper were business as usual. We put out a print edition on Tuesday 10 March. After the paper was done some of us ate chips ‘n guac and watched Spotlight in the newsroom. 48 hours later, on Thursday the 12th, we had our final meeting in the newsroom. We’ll be working remotely now until at least June.
Click on any image to see it full screen
Images below photographed with a 14mm f1.8 Sigma lens + Sony a9
The New Newsroom
We occupied the Corsair Newsroom for 4 weeks. And then, maybe we should have expected it, but we didn’t, the newsroom, like so many others around the country, was closed. Here are images of our virtual newsroom from a staff meeting on Tuesday 17 March:
The New Normal
And so the staff of The Corsair, the students of Santa Monica College, and the people of California, America, and The World embark on our nobody-knows-how-many-months-long new normal of living with COVID-19.
