Detroit News editorial page editor Nolan Finley is nostalgic and realistic about the workplace where "I've spent my entire adult life."
It is what we used to call in the south The Home Place.
And now we're moving away. The announcement last week that we are leaving the building that's housed us since 1917 to seek more efficient quarters elsewhere in Detroit is the right decision from a business viewpoint. With office space such a bargain in Detroit, it makes no sense to own and maintain an aging building that has twice as much floor space as we need.
The overhead is simply too great for a lean operating era.
But it's going to be hard to walk out onto Lafayette Boulevard for the last time. These offices, designed by Albert Kahn, are magnificent and burst with the history of the newspaper and the city.
The veteran journalist, who began as a fresh-faced news assistant (copy boy was the phrase then), frames the pending move in its broader context of an evolving industry (struggling is the phrase some choose).
Newspapers all over the country are downsizing because newspapers and their staffs are shrinking.
Working in this industry is like managing Stage 4 cancer. You hope to stay alive until someone discovers a miracle cure. So you bear the side effects of radical treatments and cut away pieces you'd rather keep. . . .
It's sad. But if shedding this building buys us more time to figure out how to move journalism profitably from the printing press to the Internet, then I'll leave here happily.
