End of an Era as Times Kills Recording Room
MORE Off the Record
When New York Times executive editor Bill Keller sent out a Nov. 28 memo announcing the layoffs of a dozen Times employees, one detail attracted little attention outside the newsroom: The paper would be eliminating a legendary Times institution, the Recording Room.
Years ago, the Recording Room was, as Gay Talese put it to Off the Record, the “way station, the midwife” for foreign, national and even New York-based reporters who needed to phone in copy in a pinch. Without the aid of e-mail—let alone a laptop—the ability to dictate copy to a Recording Room operator was a reporter’s safety net, at a time when blowing deadlines and missing the morning paper carried a greater cost than it does in today’s electronic age.
“It was indispensable,” said Arthur Gelb, the famed Times chronicler and 62-year veteran of the paper. “You could not put out The New York Times without the Recording Room.”
“I can remember countless times,” William Schmidt, a veteran Times-man who is now an assistant managing editor, told Off the Record in an e-mail, “that the Recording Room was the only thing standing between me and the ignominy of seeing a wire story run in place of my own. No matter where you were, as long as you could get them on the phone, you could land your story on deadline.”
Max Frankel, the paper’s former executive editor, agreed: “For everyone reporting around the world, it was the umbilical cord,” he said.
Mr. Talese said he used the Recording Room for civil rights reporting in Alabama; Mr. Gelb said he used it to dictate reviews from Off Broadway plays from a phone booth on Second Avenue; and Mr. Frankel said he used the paper’s London Recording Room (which no longer exists) for his dispatches from Moscow. Mr. Frankel said he would take care to slur some of his sentences so as to foil the Soviet censor on the line.
But times change. Over the past two decades, fax machines and the Internet—not to mention BlackBerries and iPhones—have rendered the Recording Room little more than a quaint antique. By January or February of next year, said Chris Campbell, who has worked there since the 1980’s, the room will no longer be staffed.
Mr. Campbell said that since he began, the Recording Room’s staff has been downsized from a dozen to three. Rarely these days are dictations delivered over the phone—the room’s main purpose now is to transcribe long interviews for reporters (quite the luxury). Still, during Hurricane Katrina, when phone lines and e-mail went down, the room was particularly critical to two Times reporters on the scene, Joe Treaster and Ralph Blumenthal.
But to a certain, older class of Times scribes, the Recording Room was more than an emergency measure. Indeed, Mr. Frankel credits the room for launching his career. Decades ago, Recording Room operators sent out messages to cruise liners and passenger ships with the next day’s Times stories. One night in July 1956, the Recording Room intercepted a distress signal from the Andrea Doria, an Italian cruiser that had just struck the Stockholm. Mr. Frankel, then a young night-rewrite reporter, was assigned to take messages from the Recording Room at the time, and got the scoop.
“It put me on the map,” Mr. Frankel said. Within two years, he would be reporting from Moscow.
There were also Times writers who continued to use the Recording Room even when more modern technologies had become available. Mr. Talese recalled being at a Holiday Inn in Selma, Ala., in 1990, reporting on the anniversary of the legendary civil rights march there. He said he called up the Recording Room to dictate his story much the same way he had 25 years earlier.
“I had a portable typewriter with me and probably did it the same way in 1990 that I did in 1965,” he said. “I didn’t change my methodology at all. Thankfully, The Times didn’t change its methodology at all, either.”
Several times in the early 1990s, when I was in Europe on assignment for the Times, I phoned in my stories via the Recording Room. It was the most romantically outdated process, and I loved it: ringing up and reading my copy, clearly enunciating and noting each capital letter, comma, period, and other piece of punctuation: "Dateline Paris, When Capital J John Smythe CAPITAL S-M-Y-T-H-E heads to his garden each morning COMMA ..." It was bizarre and wonderful at the time same and gave me a Murrowesque thrill.
Great piece!! Loved the part about the Andrea Doria.
Thanks.
Possibly the most famous of Recording Room dictations was Tom Wicker's dictation of his story on the assassination of President Kennedy --choking back tears as he dictated -- it was used to end later ABC News documentaries on the event. (Of course, ABC Close-Ups boss was Tom's wife, Pam Hill....Richard Reeves (verified, whatever that means.)
The Recording Room sometimes misheard ordinary words, leading to embarrassment or worse for the reporter or subject of the story. One time I was reporting on the volunteer work done by a famous conductor-composer in the New York suburban community in which he lived. I wrote something like, "he gives his time effortlessly on behalf of music." In print it became "he gives his time fruitlessly on behalf of music." The composer was furious and demanded a correction, which he got.
I used the recording room from the West Bank and Golan Heights in 1967, from the Sinai in 1973, from Vietnam (when I could get through) and scores of other places. It was a great comfort, something akin to talking to your mother, because you knew that your piece, with a few phonetic errors, would make the paper.
Great story, but I want to make two corrections. The Andrea Doria was not a cruiser but an ocean liner. And it did not strike the Stockholm; the Stockholm struck the Andrea Doria.
The men and women who staffed the recording room during my days at The New York Times were unfailing nice, and always patient with reporters like me whose accent they'd sometimes have problems understanding. When I think about my days as a foreign correspondent, I invariably think about how many times I needed to phone in stories on coups and other disasters -- natural or man-made -- on scratchy, unreliable phone lines. But The Times's recording-room staff always came through. Perhaps the single most important episode for me involving the recording room was when I was in northern Nigeria in October 1979, and I'd phoned in a story. The staff informed me that my then wife had just given birth to our son in India: she couldn't reach me, obviously, but she'd informed The Times, whose foreign desk alerted the recording room to let me know soonest I called. I'll always be grateful for that.
Dictating a story on deadline from written copy was one thing, but dictating from raw notes or memory into a recording machine, instead of to a rewrite reporter, could be a heck of a challenge on a breaking, complex, important story, especially from those of us who were mushmouthed, stammering or both. The men and women who monitored the incoming dictated reports were unfailingly patient, courteous and alert and saved our stones on many occasions, though the inevitable homophone, malapropism and spoonerism slipped in and were hopefully caught by the copy desk.