Last Friday was moving day. I came in to find the area I would be moving to completely torn apart while it was rearranged to give the three copy editors and myself some L-shaped desk areas. The copy desk used to be 5-6 people strong but with the dreaded cutbacks, it’s down to three and not likely to change.

An unfortunate side effect is that in deciding on the placement of me amongst the awesome copy folk, it meant the displacement of two of them, and I’m a little worried about that. If either of them read this, the blame can be entirely placed on Jack :) And if Jack reads this, it’s all your fault, yo. ;)

Today (Monday) is my first full day sitting in the fishbowl, and the striking thing is I’m suddenly being drawn into newsroom convos. I suppose I should have realized that would happen because I’m suddenly visible to newsroom folk rather than just a voice behind a wall, but it’s still kind of neat. I’m also much closer to the scanner which should be good for tweeting purposes.

As far as how it’s going with the web updating aspect of my new responsibilities, so far so good. I’ve not been able to attend the morning budget meetings yet because of a conflict with the chat, but hopefully we’ll rework that this summer. But our City Editor has been doing a fantastic job of emailing me web update ideas generated from those meetings which he’d never done before. I am appreciative. I have a feeling that the visibility factor plays a part in him remembering to do that. If I tilt my head and lean to the right a little, I can look him right in the eye now :)

So I’m learning that the struggles we’ve always had with getting the newsroom to get us updates for the web (and it has been a struggle) may become a thing of the past now that I’ve got a bit of authority to request stories for it, and now that they can see me, it might be helping to keep the web in mind as they work on stuff.

I’m also being a bit of a nag about asking for stories as well, but I have not found a good method for this yet. I need to be in those budget meetings so I can be a part of the whole news flow. As of now, I don’t really know what sort of stories may be embargoed or which ones need to have more info before going live etc.So when I ask for something I might feel would be a good update and get told that it’s not going to work, I feel a bit bad.

I imagine this will get better as I get used to my new digs and my new responsibilities, and I work myself into the newsroom.

I took a few pix during the whole move. I’d been at my previous desk for close to four years. As you can imagine, I’d “nested”, hehe. I do that. I need to look away from my monitor once in a while and be reminded of things I love, so I usually had postcards and photos of places I’ve lived and loved surrounding me to kind of remind me of the big wide world out there whenever work gets me down. Anyway, Friday and today was spend deconstruction and rebuilding.