When I first tried to attend a meeting of The Observer — ostensibly as a member of a Student International Business Council (SIBC) “campus consulting” team trying to come up with strategies to increase the student newspaper’s readership or something to that effect — it was important I knew where The Observer office was.
During my sophomore year, I transferred to a dorm on the south side of campus, a move I had no idea would affect my career ambitions so much. Now in Baumer Hall, I began regularly eating at South Dining Hall and occasionally using its restroom. Weirdly enough, during my time under the Dome, an undergraduate would only really have two reasons for going into the basement of South Dining Hall: using the restroom before or after a meal and going to The Observer office.
As a member of a SIBC campus consulting team trying to help out the paper, for once in my life, I decided to take a little initiative. I thought that if I was truly going to help out this newspaper, I better attend one of its meetings and figure out how it worked. I was not content to do research on media companies in Hesburgh Library and then present my findings at the team’s weekly meeting in DeBartolo Hall, like the rest of the students on the team. (No disrespect to my former teammates, they are probably happily employed and have stable lives, while I’m an unemployed journalist.) I was going to dig around in the weeds.
The first thing I did to try to figure out how the newspaper actually worked was call a phone number on The Observer’s website and ask when the paper had meetings. No one picked up the phone and I left a message. I have yet to receive a call back.
The next thing I did was nervously approach the door of The Observer office when I was at South Dining Hall for a meal. I reached out and grabbed the door handle for a second, just long enough to learn that the door was locked. I didn’t knock. I scurried out of the basement hoping no one had seen me actually trying to get involved with a productive campus group.
When my first two attempts to get in contact with the paper failed, I was devastated. But I also became obsessed, a modern day Captain Ahab, if you will — obsessed with getting to the bottom of how this newspaper worked. I saw copies of The Observer three times a week on that table on the first floor of O’Shaughnessy Hall by the advising deans’ office. I saw The Observer office every time I went to the restroom at South Dining Hall. I became convinced that print journalism was somehow still alive and thriving at Notre Dame.
I knew that if I didn’t do more to try to connect with some of the paper’s staffers, I would feel a tinge of regret every time I used the restroom at South Dining Hall for the rest of my college career — and possibly every time I came back to campus as an alumnus.
So I sent a message to an email address on the newspaper’s website, and the Notre Dame news editor at the time promptly got back to me. He told me when the Notre Dame news department met, and I attended the next meeting.
When I first crossed the threshold of The Observer office, I was a consultant with a business club on campus. When I crossed the threshold again to go out into the world, I was a journalist with a story assignment, and I have never been the same since.
With the exception of maybe the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, when I was a student, I came to regard The Observer office in the basement of South Dining Hall as the most sacred spot on campus.
It had no windows. Some said it smelled. But it had character.
It had yellow newspapers pinned to the wall projecting an aura of coolness possessed by Notre Dame athletes which bespoke an era when I was first learning how to hold a pen, likely the early aughts. Glossy photos from years gone by of Observer staffers — people that looked like the dearest of friends — so too were scattered about.
A generation of reporters and editors and photographers had pinned or tapped up the crowning achievements of their time on campus all over the walls, transforming the office into one great bulletin board: the definitive ranking of Taylor Swift albums, that one time an Observer reporter snuck into a photo that made it on the front page of The Observer, a slip of paper making that feeling of triumph after successfully designing one section of the one edition after spending half of college like a tumbleweed.
In one forgotten closet, I found a massive stack of the Observer edition of former University President Fr. Theodore Hesburgh when he died in 2015. In one forgotten drawer, I found a piece of paper from 2005 that outlined how the Fr. Hesburgh obituary edition would look.
The Observer office was also sacred to me for what wasn’t recorded on some wall or in some drawer: the friendship I forged in the space, the hours I spent inside way past midnight happily nitpicking headlines with the loveliest minds at Notre Dame, the hard lessons I learned in that basement abode and so much more that I struggle to put into words.
I recently heard from former Observer colleagues that the newspaper might be moving out of its office in South Dining Hall. If The Observer does move, I hope it’s to somewhere that’s very visible to the entire student population. I knew I could learn more about The Observer because I saw it when I went to the dining hall. After I learned more about The Observer, my life has never been the same since.
Peter Breen
class of 2024
March 23
