Media Jobs Daily shameless swiped from TV Newser, and now we swipe from both for the burning question of the day: Can a journalist’s desk be neat?
Charlie Gasparino of Fox Business Network says no: in the clip below, spotlighting his in chaotic workspace, he claims that “any reporter that has a neat desk isn’t a reporter.”
Mike Janssen offers this thought:
What do you think? My desk is tidy, and I am a reporter, dammit. But as we move to using less paper and more pixels, maybe it’s not the desk that matters, but the Desktop. And I won’t vouch for the state of that.
I find this conversation personally reassuring. I take the view that someone once explained to me, “If a messy desk signals a messy mind — what does an empty desk show?”
Postscript: Dave Lull writes with this link, “Neatness doesn’t count after all – tidy vs. untidy desks” to reassure me.
But as if to tweak my guilt again, Patrick Kurp of Anecdotal Evidence writes: ‘I’m a fastidious desk-keeper, by the way. A newspaper editor once purposely seated me beside another reporter whose desk was a landfill, just to bug me.”
