Melissa and I were chatting about Malcolm Gladwell's contribution to last week's episode of "This American Life" Tough Room in which he shares how terrifying his first experience in a newsroom was. The best part of the the act is what perverse and often baffling things he does to deal with his fear.
Also part of the show was a peek inside The Onion's "newsroom," which is also rather amusing.
This got me to thinking, are there any stories we could be writing about tough rooms?
If you have 45 minutes or so, listen to the show and share your thoughts. If you only have five minutes, fast forward (if you can even do that with a podcast) and listen to Gladwell, it's totally worth the small amount of time you'd be investing.
I understand how completely lame it is to comment on my own post...however, right after I posted, I thought of a bunch of different tough rooms that could fall into different newsroom beats: Hospital waiting room, emergency room, 7th grade classroom, jury room, jail cell, presenting your thesis, asking for a promotion/raise, room full of students taking the SATs, gym during tryouts, 911 call center, auditions for a play, restaurant kitchen.
ReplyDeleteObviously some rooms would be harder to get into than others, but we could do some fun stories with this theme...