A New Home

By Priyanka Dayal

See a photo slideshow of the new Kenmore Square office here

Generations of Freepers got their start in journalism in a cluttered, dingy office next to a pizza shop in West Campus.

But this year, the Daily Free Press closed its doors at 842 Commonwealth Ave. and moved to a smaller, sleeker space in Kenmore Square.

The move makes financial sense: it's saving the Freep $60,000 a year in rent. But the transition didn't come easily.

Editors, many of whom saw their share of sunrises from the stoop of the old office, spent hours dismantling the very history they helped create, transporting it piece by piece to the new office.

The newspaper's new headquarters, at 648 Beacon St., took some getting used to, especially for the editors who spent most of their waking hours at the old office with some of their closest friends.

Most of them will agree that something about the grungy chaos of the old newsroom gave it a certain charm. The Freep's newest staffers - and there were many last spring - will never know how it used to be. But the veterans aren't likely to forget it.

"I was really attached to the old office," Nick Cammarota, the spring semester's layout editor and two-time sports editor, said after the move. "But this isn't bad... The transition has been pretty good and not as heavy-handed as it seemed at the beginning-which is a good thing, because this is a college paper."

David Brand, spring's Spotlight editor and a former assistant city editor, also was sorry to leave the old space.

"I was disappointed, because it was fun in that office," he said. "That's where I started. That's what a college newspaper office is supposed to look like."

Many of the posters and signs that hung in the old office were moved to the new space, but some things couldn't be moved. Freep editors, after all, have a habit of writing on walls. That's what Brand misses.

The new space has its advantages. It's smaller - a lot smaller - so writers and editors don't have to shout through walls and hallways to communicate. City news, campus news and sports have been clumped much closer together. Writers and editors now work inches away from each other.

"We're all a lot closer now," said Stephanie Perry, Spring 2008's editor in chief.

As the first Freep editor to work in the new office, Perry faced new and different challenges. She was part of the group that spent last winter break hauling furniture and computers a mile down Commonwealth Avenue in a Budget truck. Once the move was complete, the computers were, at best, uncooperative, and dogged the staff for the entire semester.

"The move was difficult," Perry said. "There was a lot to move, as anyone who's ever worked in the old office would know. All of those things that accumulated over 20 years, it was a lot to go through."

The new office, in the same block as Barnes & Noble and Cornwall's in Kenmore Square, is a rectangle of three rooms. One of those rooms, smaller than the old office's photo department, is the newsroom.

There's no darkroom, no upstairs meeting space and no editor's office.

And there's no front stoop.

But the Green Line is still steps away. And remember those tattered, discolored sofas? Most of those survived the move.

Perry was too busy last spring to dwell on the old office.

"It's not something I think about often, " she said. pointing to the scattered notes and papers on her desk. "My immediate vicinity is the same is it would have been there."

Others needed more time before the space could start to feel familiar.

"I think it's developing its own character," Brand said.