Wednesday, August 26, 1998

Spreading the news without pastepots

By Bob Greene

DETROIT - With all the noise and turmoil that has rolled through the newspaper business this summer, the fact that the Detroit Free Press moved to a different building would seem to be a small item, hardly worth mentioning.

The Free Press, one of the oldest newspapers in the United States, moved three blocks - from its grungy old headquarters at 321 W. Lafayette to 600 W. Fort St. The Free Press' new quarters are in the building already occupied by its competitor, the Detroit News.

At one time the idea of the Free Press and the News sharing a building in Detroit would have been preposterous. The rivalry between those two papers has been one of the fiercest in journalism; Detroit is a great, no-nonsense American city, and the battle between its newspapers has long reflected the toughness of the town.

In recent years, pushed by economic factors (and exacerbated by one of the ugliest strikes in recent history), the two newspapers have combined many of their business operations; the editorial staffs remain separate and independent, but the Free Press and the News now operate jointly in other areas. So owners of the two papers decided it would make sense for the Free Press to move into the News' building.

The Free Press' old headquarters building was part of the big-city newspaper romance of a fast-vanishing era, an era that made many of us fall in love with this business in the first place. Former Free Press publisher Neal Shine, who worked in the old building for 46 years, starting as a copy boy, reminisced:

"I liked the way it smelled: cigar and cigarette smoke, paper and paste, ink and newsprint, lead melting in the composing room furnaces.

"Most of all, I liked the way it sounded: the chatter of typewriters and Teletypes, the almost musical rattle of the Linotypes, the rumble of the huge presses in the subbasement that tickled the soles of your feet five floors up.

"News and editorial staffs were a questionable collection of idealists, cynics, oddballs, miscreants, hustlers, ne'er-do-wells, misfits, has-beens, prodigies, troublemakers, recidivists and geniuses. If you add to all that the never-ending parade of the peculiar - that strange mix of unusual people who seem drawn by some natural force to the newsrooms of America - you have the stuff of which memories are made, in whatever newspaper building you happen to be."

In today's computer-age, dustless, we're-all-sober-minded-professionals-here world of newspapers, Shine's description of what newspapering once felt like is like a woodcut out of a volume of history. And that one newspaper decides to share walls and plumbing with another paper should be expected to draw a shrug, if that, from the public at large.

But it's all part of larger changes in the newspaper business. The most amazing is the stunningly rapid growth of newspapers' on-line editions. With the tap of a few keys, anyone anywhere in the world can read the current editions of papers large and small, from cities and towns everywhere. Originally skeptical about the on-line editions, I have been completely won over by their ability to deliver our work in an instant; each morning I am greeted by electronic messages from readers of this column (www.chicagotribune.com/go/greene) who are seeing it in New Zealand, in Japan, in tiny and remote towns where my newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, has never circulated.

It's changing everything - including the definition of what a newspaper is. If the Detroit Free Press moving three blocks in downtown Detroit is a symbolically significant event, then what are we to make of the evolution of a front page from a piece of newsprint to a glass screen?

And if newspaper publishers are feeling the change, then think about the far-from-certain future of out-of-town newsstands - those great, ramshackle, eccentric fixtures of big cities, where you could buy papers shipped in from around the world three or four (or more) days late. Now a home computer screen is the greatest out-of-town newsstand of all time - where you can read that day's papers, from everywhere, without leaving your house.

But we were talking about Detroit, and the Free Press' move into the News' building. Call it anything you like - "sleeping with the enemy" would seem to say it - but place your bets that it won't smell like cigars or melted lead.

Chicago Tribune