I received some great photos already, please keep them coming. Let’s celebrate shonky dives. And I don’t object to the odd news palace as well. This week’s hovel is a picture told in words, from Sarah Dunn, seen above on an overseas news internship circa 2014, after she began working at the Nelson Mail as described below.
Spotted your post calling for ‘Real Hovels of News’ and couldn’t resist sharing an anecdote from an early twenty-teens era regional Fairfax newsroom.
Back in those days, the sports reporters clustered together in a pod of desks separate to everyone else. One grey-bearded senior sports writer had a number of RSI-preventing devices hooked up on and around his desk to help him continue working.
He’d been away for a few weeks when I arrived in the newsroom, green and keen, and was asked to occupy his desk temporarily. As I swept in and took a seat, the air I’d displaced created a draught that lifted hundreds and hundreds of little beard hairs from every surface. The RSI-preventing devices had trapped beard hairs everywhere, and the hairs were all through the keyboard, mouse, piles of papers and mounds of takeaway containers that littered the space. They were free-floating in the air and getting all over me.
The sports reporters only reacted to any of this when I began cleaning the hairs up with a bottle of lavender Spray’n Wipe. Apparently the scent was unfamiliar…
Thanks for sharing Sarah. Please get in contact with more stories.