The N&O has left its old home, about the same time I stopped getting the paper at home. I hope the change works out for both of us. It may be tough for them. I hear money is tight there, and my going digital-only is a $470 hit to their revenues.

Rob Christensen was right when he wrote that the old place at 215 South McDowell Street was a dump. It was a dump when I started working there as a 16-year-old copyboy in June 1965.

Back then the newsroom was filled with white men wearing white shirts and ties. Most of them smoked. Most of them drank heavily, some on the clock.

As Rob noted, women were relegated to the Society section, or the library. Now, the N&O has a woman publisher and a woman editor. (“Yeah, just like always. You guys make a mess, and you expect us to clean it up.”)

Speaking of a mess, the worst was Pat Stith. He drank coffee from little Styrofoam cups, then he spit tobacco juice into the cups. His desk was full of little white cups half-full of indeterminate brown liquid. When I was night city editor, he once brought me some copy (on real paper, kids) with a brown smudge on the first page. “Is that coffee or tobacco juice?” I asked him. Pat took a hard look at the page. “Not sure,” he said.

The N&O execs say the new Fayetteville Street office befits a modern digital-news operation. From pictures I’ve seen, it looks like the newsroom floor is made up of (print) newspaper pages. One observer say it looks like a place you take your puppy to get housebroken.

Here’s wishing the N&O crew, those of you who are still left, good luck in your new home. The world is going to hell in a handbasket, everybody in America gets “news” from someplace that just reinforces what they already think, Trump is President, your editorial page has been spayed, and newspapers have picked one hell of a time to go through an existential crisis.

Get to work. “Copy!”