News about the news business

Michael Wilson has an article in The New York Times about the NYPD and the media:

Most towns with a newspaper and a police department have a “cop shop”, a place where reporters go to gather information on crimes and arrests. Only in New York is it called “the shack”. Always a news office, and in years past also a bar, betting parlor, and dorm, the shack is the nest at New York Police Headquarters where a dozen or so reporters, assigned to competing news organizations but at times working as a team, cover crime and the people who fight it.
Collegial, masculine in spirit, if not gender, and challenged in all matters of hygiene, the shack crew has for 146 years lived in the midst of the police, sometimes in the basement, sometimes across the street in a set of very grimy offices that inspired the name “the shack".
Today, the shack is a warren of little offices in a corner of the second floor of Police Headquarters at One Police Plaza. And its future— not for the first time— is in question. Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly last week told the reporters for the news outlets there, including The Associated Press, The Daily News, The New York Post, The New York Times, Newsday, The Staten Island Advance, El Diario, NY1 News, and 1010 WINS, to move out by August to make room for a new command center.
The Police Department is exploring where to move them, perhaps to a conference room, but the announcement troubled several generations of police reporters and their advocates. “Reporters who cover that beat on a daily basis provide an institutional history that can be lost if you’re staffing from offices on 44th Street,” said David Krajicek, who worked in the shack for The Daily News. “If you’re there every day, you’re keeping an eye on the institution. Proximity does not necessarily translate to access, but it does translate to focus. If you send them away,” he said, “they’re going to come back.”
Asked on Thursday about the eviction, Mayor Michael Bloomberg depicted the reporters’ concerns as whiny. “We’re not taking away your rights to cover it,” he said. “If you don’t think you can cover it from a distance, maybe they should find somebody who can.”
Over the years, the shack has been home to a rogues’ gallery of cast-iron characters: Guy Passant of The Times, or “Putt-Putt,” for the way he seemed to be always on the move; Vinnie Lee of The Daily News, a big man whose appetite for a good story and Heinekens was the stuff of legend; and Patrick Doyle, aka The Inspector because of his ability to suggest when questioning rank-and-file police officers that he was a police superior, without saying so outright.
“It’s Doyle from headquarters,” was one of his true, if misleading, ways to begin a conversation. In a suit and fedora, he showed up at crime scenes for The News looking like he belonged, just another detective with work to do. “He’d just walk right past the yellow tape,” said John Kifner, 67, who worked in the shack for The Times.
Mike Bosak, a retired sergeant and unofficial historian of the New York Police Department, said the press corps has been living cheek-by-jowl with its subject since 1863, when reporters had offices in the basement of the new headquarters on Mulberry Street. This cheerful arrangement lasted all of twelve years, until George Walling, the superintendent of police, as the office was then named, had them evicted because, according to Mr. Bosak, he did not like their snooping around. The press stayed out during the years Theodore Roosevelt ran the department. But when Police Headquarters moved to 240 Centre Street in 1910, the reporters followed, setting up shop in an old tenement across the street. “Captains, inspectors, deputy chiefs, they would all come in,” said Nicholas Pileggi, the true-crime author of Wise Guy and other books and screenplays, and the Associated Press’s man in the shack from 1956 to 1966. “Detectives would hang around. I’ve been in many a card game in the shack with police captains. You could relax, have a drink. They were not in sacred Police Department ground.”
The place was a dump without air-conditioning. When the telephones rang, colored lights on the phones would glow and they would be visible from the bar at the corner. A red light for one newspaper. A blue light for another. “If the light went on you could go back and call the desk,” Mr. Kifner recalled.
It was an era when the police sent out their crime reports by teletype and often ended them with a predictable postscript: “The perpetrators escaped in an unknown manner.”
The reporters forged a bunker mentality: Us against Them. The enemy, though, was not the Police Department, but their editors, several journalists from those days recalled. If a reporter’s telephone rang while he was at the bar, someone would invariably answer, “Oh, he’s across the street.”
Reporting giants like Gay Talese, David Halberstam, Joe Cotter, and McCandlish Phillips worked their shifts at the shack.
“We were getting paid $35, $45 a week,” said Michael Kaufman, a former Times reporter. “One of the advantages of being a reporter in those days was you got to stay up late and see dead bodies. It gave us street cred.”
When the new headquarters at One Police Plaza opened in 1973, the reporters moved into the building. “It had a much too antiseptic feel to its inhabitants, who enjoyed the comforts of home in the workplace, including cigars, spittoons, and a bottle in the drawer,” said John Miller, a former reporter turned police spokesman. But soon, very soon, after the reporters moved in, said Francis McLoughlin, a former reporter and police spokesman from 1974 to 1978, “it became the same ratty kind of place.” Mr. McLoughlin recalled how Inspector Doyle helped to re-establish the old atmosphere by using the drawers of his desk as an ashtray for his cigars. “The super wanted to throw Doyle out,” he said.
The Daily News’ office was plastered with pictures of nude women, until Mary Ann Giordano, the paper’s and the city’s first female police bureau chief (and now a Times editor), and Alice McGillion, the police spokeswoman from 1980 to 1988, put their feet down. “I told them I would not go down there until they took them down,” Ms. McGillion said. The bunker mentality survived, however. “They would all get together before they called the story back and made sure all the quotes were exactly the same,” Mr. McLoughlin said. “Nobody wanted a quote different than someone else’s quote.”
Mr. Krajicek, a former Daily News bureau chief, said the collegial spirit dipped a bit in the 1990s. The city was in a crack epidemic. Crime was at an all-time high. Relations among reporters, and between the reporters and the police, became strained. “It was a wary camaraderie,” Mr. Krajicek said. “It was friendly enough, but nobody was giving up any secrets to what they were working on.”
The wariness remains evident in the pack approach the reporters still sometimes use to siphon information from the police press office, known as DCPI because the boss of the unit is the deputy commissioner of public information. It’s an eleven-story ride to DCPI offices on the thirteenth floor, and the reporters generally prefer to take the trip together, partly because they believe there is strength in numbers, partly because they believe it never hurts to keep an eye on the other guy.
Wendell Jamieson worked nights in the shack for New York Newsday in the early 1990s alongside two competitors, Jose Lambiet of The News and Philip Messing, with The Post.
“We’d go out to dinner together,” said Mr. Jamieson, now a Times editor. “We’d stop the news. We knew that nothing could happen as long as each of us could see the other two.” But even this simple arrangement fell to pieces when Mr. Lambiet and Mr. Messing had a falling-out over a story. “We could never go out again, except on Christmas Eve, when we would shake hands,” Mr. Jamieson said.
Mr. Messing works in the shack for The Post today. He has inherited, willingly or otherwise, a portion of the mantle of his predecessors. He has in past years been known to enjoy, like The Inspector before him— health police be damned— an occasional smoke at the keyboard. He was present when One Police Plaza was the site of a bombing on 31 December 1982, and he helped drag a wounded officer to an ambulance. “I don’t know which guy I grabbed,” Mr. Messing said by phone on his way to the shack the other day. “Half the reason I was carrying him was to try to get into the ambulance and see what I could get on the story.”

Rico says he originally thought, based on its title, that the article was about the book The Shack, which sits on his shelf still unread (sorry, Noelle; I'll get to it), but no. And, in the Zelig quality of his life, he knew Russell Baker and David Halberstam, both reporters for the Times, when he lived in Nantucket...