Time to turn the page on
THIS is it, then – our last working day in the building which has been home to The Journal, Chronicle and Sunday Sun for more than half a century.
We are on the move, upping sticks – our destination a nicely appointed office suite at the top of intu Eldon Square.
The presses have been decommissioned; the printers and city centre newspaper sellers with their baffling cries (“Chronnycuuul”) are history.
As long as there have been newspapers there has been change. It was what brought us here in the first place as an expanding operation.
Our previous home, Kemsley House, on Westgate Road, had outlived its use by the time the Thomson Organisation bought the Newcastle titles from Kemsley Newspapers in 1960.
In his memoir A Public Eye, Robert Clough, managing director through the 1960s, wrote: “On Roy [later Lord] Thomson’s first visit to the office, I shepherded him through the labyrinths, tramping from one physically unrelated section to another, up winding narrow stairs to Dickensian attics.”
Thomson sanctioned at first a “costly disembowelling of the whole building” and then – when Clough heard that a warehouse on nearby Pudding Chare, running off the Bigg Market, might soon be available – a new building.
“Within three years Newcastle had the most modern newspaper office in the country,” wrote Clough.
It was opened at 2.45pm on May 7, 1965 by Prime Minister Harold Wilson who was taken afterwards for a VIP lunch at the Royal Station Hotel.
The building is still known to many as Thomson House, although it, along with everything produced within, has been owned by Trinity Mirror since 1999. The Newcastle arm of Trinity Mirror’s nationwide news operation, formerly Newcastle Chronicle & Journal Ltd, has for some years been called ncjMedia.
Clough, who spent 30 years in Kemsley House, admitted feeling attached to its “fusty homeliness” but also took much of the credit for making the move happen. He is still commemorated by Clough Lane, the passage beside our current building where newsprint was offloaded from huge wagons and newspapers hot off the press were bundled into liveried vans. That wasn’t so very long ago but it seems like aeons. For some time now the Newcastle titles have been printed on Teesside. Clough predicted that “new technology Robert Clough, looking back on the 1960s will in due course demolish most of the traditional working practices” but he couldn’t have predicted the digital revolution.
While millions still buy a newspaper and we will continue to produce thousands of them every day, print has been on the wane. The writing is not so much on the wall as on dozens, if not hundreds, of handheld screens.
Where readers go, advertisers follow and so must we.
A digitally driven business with a website, www.chroniclelive.co.uk, does not require massive presses or newsprint.
Nor does it require a workforce nearly 1,000-strong. Around 200 people are now employed here but gathered on one floor, with the other two empty.
But do we, like Clough, feel a pang as another building and another new era beckon?
The longer-serving among us certainly feel some nostalgia, if not for the building then for what happened in it.
I joined as a reporter in 1982 when hot metal was still the name of the game and three newspapers had separate staffs and territories.
The printers ruled the roost, as in every newspaper centre. They could stop the presses.
It was the reason you could get a meal in the canteen until midnight – handy, since the last reporter’s shift ended at 2.30am.
In the newsroom, Chronicle and Journal reporters eyed each other suspiciously, guarding their potential scoops. You rarely strayed onto each other’s patch.
During my 36 years I have seen many restructures and relaunches. My desk has faced many bits of the old Thomson House walls.
I came at the tail end of the Falklands War and reported on the miners’ strike of 1984-5.
The outside world came to us via TV screens, at first on tables and then wall-mounted. Particular events punctuate my memories – Zola Budd tripping Mary Decker at the 1984 Olympics, the first televising of the Commons in 1989, OJ Simpson’s acquittal in 1994 and, of course, the horrors of 9/11, unfolding as I wrote up a Jamie Oliver interview which had suddenly become unimportant.
It’s the stories and the people you remember.
There was the library where staff literally cut-and-pasted newspaper stories onto sheets of A4, one lady quietly humming hymns as she did so.
There was the fearsome chief sub, forever beating his leg with a metal ruler, and there was the over-excited news editor who, echoing ‘Stormin’ Norman’ Schwarzkopf, US commander in chief during the 1990 Gulf War, would urge his reporters to: “Kick ass!”
And every Friday night, exiting the building, we would find ourselves in the exuberant Bigg Market throng.
Being shown around by another reporter on my first day, an impressive figure – sheepskin coat, tan and a fair bit of bling – emerged from a lift.
“He’s famous,” whispered my guide. “That’s John Gibson.”
Gibbo, the chronicler of all things