Star’s move requires a rethink of the office
Extra! Extra! We’re moving.
The Star’s proprietors recently announced that the paper is relocating — lock, stock and barrel, dolls and dishes, bats and balls.
Downsizing and decluttering, which is all the retrenchment rage. Selling off archives in the process: all those framed front pages, photographs, editorial cartoons, a rummage bazaar of our past.
I suppose that pulling up stakes and planting them elsewhere is an act of faith in the newspaper biz. Beats the hell out of folding or, yech, going completely online, as many publications have done over the last decade, ditching the prohibitive expense of newsprint and distribution.
The Sun, the National Post, the Globe and Mail, have all gone the re-lo route, shifting to new digs in the past few years.
As a friend reminded me the other night, the Star has just marked its 50th anniversary at One Yonge Street. That’s an iconic address, down here at the very bottom of the longest street in the world, stretching 1,896 kilometres.
I’m loath to surrender the prestige of it, just when the neighbourhood was getting interesting. When I first walked into the newsroom as a 17-yearold cub reporter, nearly half a century ago, the Star was a reverse urban outpost, with no bars, restaurants or stores in the vicinity. Tethered to their desks, copy editors — known as rim-pigs — had to order in meals every night. Now lakeside sprawl (condos, giant supermarkets, hip tech companies) is gobbling up the shoreline. Not that the city ever took much care of its waterfront, allowing carpetbagger developers to build ugly-as-spit monstrosities. Really, should take a wrecking ball to the whole fiasco.
Which is doubtless what will happen after we vacate the premises late next year, with the towering Pinnacle One project already underway while we were pandemic sleeping. We were merely long-term tenants, not owners. I can only imagine the value of this land these days.
Oh, if these walls could talk. Maybe someday I’ll do the blabbing for them. Fling open the closet doors, let all the skeletons come tumbling out.
At least we’re not ’burbsbound.
The newish owners have circulated specs for our new abode, some two kilometres west at Front and Spadina. Looks fancy-schmancy, this “multifunctional space” — called “The Well” (eyeroll) — with proximity to all the bells and whistles of downtown existence. Though when I went by for a lookie-loo this week, there wasn’t much to see beyond the bare-bones structure, the site bristling with construction cranes.
The office of the future is here and now.
I’m happy with a desk where I can plop my ancient Underwood typewriter — a relic but once upon a time I actually pounded out my stories on it, when the newsroom was clackety-clack noisy on deadline and editors yelled COPY! When the presses rumbled underfoot and I could watch, from a viewing bridge, as the paper rolled down a conveyer belt and into trucks.
Once upon a time dreary we also had a bar, The Print Room, on the ground floor, which was windowless and hideous in just about every respect, but a tremendous amount of professional bonding went on there, bitch-fests galore, the occasional digit broken in a thumbwrestling contest, and the lovely scent of a freshly printed newspaper in your hands when copy boys brought them downstairs hot off the press. Frontpage bylines never felt so good.
Memory Lane is a boring destination for those who weren’t there. Reinvention is the byword to staying relevant. And “the office,” as we’ve always known it, is rapidly becoming a thing of the past, both physically and metaphysically. COVID drove many of us into working remotely and Zooming out the yin-yang.
In days of yore — 20 months ago — people went to the office because they had to. It was why we got up in the morning and dressed in something other than sweatpants. Those days of slouching towards productivity, dishevelled, are fading.
This plague will eventually end, burn itself out, become endemic. It will still overwhelmingly sicken the elderly, if not causing such catastrophic fatalities. But otherwise we’ll learn to live with it — unless another complicating variant comes along — as a respiratory illness, with infections reaching an equilibrium where the proportion of the susceptible population is in balance with the likelihood of transmission, and with vaccinations, augmented by boosters, pushing that equilibrium nexus lower. Israel is already testing fourth doses.
The post-pandemic office requires a rethink, particularly for employees who’ve come to rather prefer working from home and need to be lured back when it’s safe to do so. Of course, most working stiffs won’t have the option, but a kind of hybrid compromise might be possible — a few days at the office, a few days at home — after nearly two years of the office actually being the off-site.
What will that office look like in the future-is-now?
Forget sci-fi fantasies and emerging Artificial Intelligence replacing us all. Job One should be repurposing offices so that employees can more deftly collaborate in real time on specific undertakings while forging deeper camaraderie, objectives we might have ignored in the before-time, with everyone so intensely preoccupied with their own responsibilities and advancement. That means making the office a genuine destination, something beyond a place where you hang around from nine to five.
Designers say cubicles and serried desks are out, with space devoted instead to internal “neighbourhoods,” where team work can be done more flexibly. Hot-desking — sharing them — is a concept that has not gone over well, from the anecdotal stories I’m hearing. We still want our own designated work spot: don’t take my chair. It will become necessary, however, to blend those working at the office with those working remotely. We’ve generally got the hang of this already, even those of us who are tech-dolts.
On-site bars — recreational niches — will also be a thing, according to some designers. From water cooler to Cosmos and Negronis on tap at 410 Front St. W., the Star’s new address (I think)?
For some, that will take us back to where we started — with a bottle in the desk and a glass raised after deadline witching hour.
Cheers -30- to that.