News / Clark County News

From the Newsroom: We moved the furniture

By Craig Brown, Columbian Editor

Published: January 11, 2025, 6:09am

Steve Fessler reassembles reporter desks on Wednesday afternoon in The Columbian's newsroom. (Taylor Balkom/The Columbian)

As I mentioned last week, we are in the process of combining the Camas-Washougal Post-Record’s two-person news staff with The Columbian’s 14-member local news team in an effort to improve both papers. This week the effort took physical shape as we rearranged some of the newsroom furniture.

Luckily, we have that beige modular stuff that was so popular in the 1990s. It can be unbolted and bolted back together in a variety of arrangements. In this case, we wanted to make a squarish pod of four reporter desks along our south wall. (If you’ve ever been in our newsroom, that is the wall with the gigantic hand-tinted mural of Vancouver, looking north from the river, taken from an airplane in 1978.)

Our own Lego Master, Steve Fessler, started the process Tuesday morning by looting some existing workstations for spare parts. But trouble arose shortly thereafter when our information technology director, Brian MacKay, discovered the Ethernet cables in the floor were running the wrong way. The cables lie in trenches chipped out of a concrete slab sometime after this portion of the building was built, which I would guess was the early 1960s. In those days, we didn’t need data cables. Reporters used manual typewriters and rotary dial phones while smoking cigarettes and drinking lukewarm coffee. The best reporters could do all of these things at the same time.

So, we settled on a compromise. Each of the reporters — Chrissy Booker, Brianna Murschel, Mia Ryder-Marks and Alexis Weisend — got the same sized work stations as had been planned, but their desks are strung out in a row, near the cables.

Anytime we move the furniture it gets me nostalgic for my early days at The Columbian back in the late 1980s. I had just turned 27, was new to town, newly married and looking for a full-time newspaper job. Unfortunately, The Columbian was doing layoffs. But they offered me work as a stringer. Most of my assignments were routine coverage of small-town public meetings, like the Ridgefield City Council or the La Center school board. As I recall my standard payment was $35 per story.

In those days the newsroom was furnished with yellow Steelcase desks and filing cabinets, sitting on rust-colored carpet with a few royal blue accents. Even then it wasn’t attractive. First-generation computers were in use, having recently supplanted the IBM Selectric typewriters used in the 1970s. At The Columbian, there was one Video Display Terminal, or VDT, for every two reporters, mounted on a swivel so that it could be shared between desks.

The reporters’ VDTs had only a small amount of memory, not enough for an average-sized story, so they had to be written in takes. One of the customary habits of the reporters was to wait until the afternoon when the copy editors went home, then slide over to the massive copydesk and use the VDTs there. Those terminals held enough memory to work on a story all at once. When you got done, you would enter a command to send the story to “4;111.” I don’t know what happened after that!

After a year or so I got a full-time job at Oregon Business Magazine in Portland, and after that was out of the news business for awhile. By the time I came back to The Columbian as a temporary business reporter in the late 1990s, everyone had their own personal computer and used word processing software called WordPerfect, plus GroupWise for email. There was quite a controversy over whether to give reporters internet access, as it was still considered the devil’s tool. We compromised, equipped three or four shared computers with Netscape Navigator, and set them up in a spot where everyone could see what you were looking at.

Our technology is pretty modern now, I think. But I still think about the olden days sometimes, like when we move the furniture.

Related Stories