Friday night, I had a vivid dream.
I was moving through a newspaper office somewhere in a snowy town in what I gathered was Alaska. I was assigned to write a story about first responders to some kind of local mishap. I was tying it to the brave actions of emergency medical and fire professionals in places like Arlington, Va. and Malibu, Calif. in recent weeks dealing with various disasters.
There were a couple of interesting aspects about this dream. One was the setting. The office was eerily reminiscent of the newspaper office in which I worked for a decade.
It was the usual kind of late 50s to early 60s brutalist architecture — marble, glass, steel. There was a glass-enclosed office where the executives sat, green upholstery in some of the office chairs (with some cracks in the seams), and, oddly enough, a small theater space with blue padded seats. That setting was one which I could not only see and feel, but also smell. It was a building that I could tell was heated by geothermal, because I could feel a musty steam heat.
I walked around the office, looking for a bathroom. One of the newsroom staff said, “Try to pick the one that works.” There were hand-lettered cardboard signs above many of the doors leading out of the marble-floored newsroom, indicating what was behind the various doors.
I was writing the story on a computer terminal, not on a laptop, with a television going on in the background giving news of the event I was commenting about.
I found the context of this dream interesting, as well as the context. Today, my old newspaper (not in Alaska, mind you), publishes its final print edition. It is one of seven newspapers owned by the Newhouse publishing empire, that will be ending their print editions. One of those seven, the Jersey Journal out of Secaucus, will be ending publication altogether after 158 years.
There was magic in writing a story and seeing it on a printed page a only a couple of hours, thanks to the labor of many people on our night shift. I got to meet paste-up and print people as well as my editors over the years. I got the whole lifecycle of a single newspaper — one which repeated itself day after day, year after year.
I have a lot of memories of the old place, which was sold a few years ago. I have memories of having a meal on the porch overlooking a sparsely-used railroad line. There was also a lot next to the building which, as I would later learn, have to be cleaned up because of chemicals used in fixing and developing photographs in the soil. That had to have been remediated in order for a school to move into the building.
I have memories of the smells of wax, dust, developer, and ink. I can still hear the beeps of computers, the hum of printing presses, and the conversations late at night in the paste-up area. I spent a lot of late nights in that building, especially election nights when it was important to get the result right as early as possible when you have five editions to get out the door.
I spent a decade in the business before figuring out what was happening to the newspaper business and to journalism in the long run. Part of that product is what you are reading right now.
And so, regrettably, it goes.