The building is sold.
This paper – The Irish News – is moving to a new location.
There have been many changes down the years from the broadsheet that my father held up to the light, one eye closed, as he studied the detail over his Saturday fry.
“Do you know who’s dead, Lily,” he’d shout to my mother. We’d roll our eyes.
But I loved the old Celtic Gothic script – loved the crisp feel of the paper and the stories clustered in tight columns across the pages.
The wonders of modern technology mean that I can’t remember the last time I darkened the building’s doors.
With a laptop in one hand and a trusty modem in the other, you can work from the Caribbean if you like.
Still, part of me crumbled with the news that the paper will no longer operate from Donegall Street.
It’s the last paper to go – Century Newspapers and the Belfast Telegraph have already left the road.
You’re no longer likely to spot a friend and fellow reporter on a corner wielding a notebook.
Old time journalism has had its day… breaking news is break neck news – it feels like there is little time to think, just get it out now.
The Irish News was where I got my first job in the newspaper world. I had a grand title – editorial assistant.
I still remember going into the front office before my interview and seeing a real journalist walk in wearing a trench coat with a notebook tucked under his arm.
“That’s who I want to be,” I thought.
It was a dipping of my toe in the water. The interview involved a general knowledge test that included the spelling out of the acronym Cohse – I remember it still because I didn’t know it back then… you can print it on my gravestone, Times New Roman please.
My offer of employment was no boring typewritten spell-checked contract – it was a personal letter scrawled in turquoise blue ink by the then editor. I liked it.
Back in the early 1980s, the building was a little crumbly around the edges.
You clambered up the back stairs to the newsroom and I had a desk in the room next door with the librarian and the photographer.
It was just how I imagined a newsroom should be – the frantic clip, clip, clip of antique typewriters and one-handed typists knocking out stories, doors swinging open and shut, reporters running in and out.
The phones rang often and, occasionally, with shaking hands, I’d take down a warning and a codename.
Of course there were rows and shouts and phones crashing down, carbon copies piling up at the news editor’s desk and mugs of tea for all.
It was my job to unwrap the “comms” sent from prisoners, unfold the pill-size folded sheet of toilet paper and decipher the tiny script, typing up the message.
It felt important not to think about which orifice had been used to get the comm out of jail.
That Irish News job was a short stay for me – but we had so many laughs.
In the afternoons I’d take copy – get to know our corrs ringing in, have a chat and occasionally wonder at the wisdom of the greyhound owner who called his dog Erection.
Across Donegall Street, I’d saunter to lift the morning papers. There was Gerry Marshall smiling at the counter and behind him a whole world of news... the Frankfurter Allgemeine; Le Monde; El Pais; what’s your poison?
Men in dark suits smoked outside Hugh O’Kane’s – gentle undertakers who lived through dark days. You didn’t dare to think what they had seen.
Morning break meant a trip to the bakery for snowballs and iced diamonds plus the all-important boss’s choice, we could never forget “Mr Fitz’s coconut finger”.
I didn’t know that I’d make friends for life in the old room with the wonky typewriter that didn’t work so you had to rewind the ribbon spool with your finger as the caller waited to deliver copy down the line.
I didn’t know that I’d meet the kindest and warmest people who loved the newspaper with a passion and felt the importance of what they were doing through the darkest of times.
Even through the Troubles, it was an honour to have a side seat as history was made.
Goodbye Donegall Street… the ghosts of my old friends stand waving on the corner.
