You know it’s a layout day when you're eating a bowl of spaghetti with your fingers at your desk — while you’re waiting 20 minutes for Adobe Acrobat to open a .pdf file micrometer by micrometer on a 1998 Mac. Or you're cruising down Main Street in the small hours, blasting classical string concertos with the car window open, and snow is blowing in because the window's stuck.

Newsrooms and late-night shifts have been part of my life for 15 years. When everyone said newspapers were dying, I chose to work for one. In January 2008, as websites with names like “Newspaper Death Watch” chronicled the closings of major metropolitan dailies, I came to the Berkshire Eagle, the regional daily newspaper in Berkshire County, to edit Berkshires Week, a weekly arts and communtiy section that had covered the county since 1954. 

It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve fallen in love with a place or a practice people say is vanishing. Dairy farms matter to me too, and novels, homemade bread and contradance music. But I’m not convinced newspapers will lose this fight. I’m not convinced because people kept telling me they wanted what I wrote — 200 people came to the reading of this book about entanglement physics because of that story. I heard that kind of testimony every week. 

But the pressure of tightening budgets, shrinking news staff, dominating advertising and archaic technology ... I know those too. At the Eagle, I fought for the magazine and my job from the beginning. In the end I held on to both for seven and a half years, and they put me at the hub of this community.  

The Berkshires are a range of hills with open ridge lines, so far west in Massachusetts that most of the state forgets they exist. They have always lain at the edge of settled areas, and they have always drawn people. They have held winter deer hunting camps, isolated farms, wealthy city folk, mills now empty, and modern dancers and classical musicians rehearsing on summer afternoons.  

The Berkshire Eagle has covered these hills for some 225 years. It makes its home in an old mill building near the center of Pittsfield with a labyrinthine printing press on the first floor and office space above. My desk sat in a corner by a window. It was a tall, broad window set into the rear brick wall, and we kept the blinds drawn across a view of the back parking lot, but it let in sunlight. 

On the wall behind me, beside the book case piled with copies of my magazine, I had taped a bicycle map of Berkshire County that included ice cream stands. The Features Editor and the Arts and Entertainment Editor had the two desks beside mine, stretching to the aisle, and they could talk easily together. A low partition ran between my desk and theirs, covered with a Williams College calendar and a bright red and gold card one of the reporters had given me after writing story about Chinese New Year for me. She had talked to students at a local college who were celebrating far from home.

In my desk chair, I could sit invisibly laying out local news pages at midnight and listening to the sports writers wrangling over whether to cover the World Cup. Voices carried around the newsroom in a steady background hum. The features department ran in an informal, cooperative spirit — we would roll chairs together for spontaneous meetings — and the newsroom ran on conversation. A reporter once asked the room at large the best word to describe a plastic bag blowing across the pavement. 

One night, I remember, a fault in our computer system left the night crew unable to work until our systems team could fix the problem. We had to call a systems crewmember to come in from home, and since most of the editorial staff had computers at least 10 years old (running on an AppleTalk network), we knew it would take time. Later in the evening, with deadline looming, this kind of glitch would have set people on edge, but this early everyone sat back in their chairs, and the usual casual exchanges around the room intensified. The features paginator and the layout man in charge of the B section — who had both worked for the Eagle more than 20 years —  left off bantering across their desks and launched into Danny Boy at top volume in a pair of surprisingly good tenor voices: But come you back when summer's in the meadow, or when the valley's hushed and white with snow ...

They were singing a lament, and they were punchy at their blueberry plastic monitors, and they were laughing, and so were we all.