LONDON â€" A mundane errand this week took me back to Fleet Street, the birthplace and erstwhile beating heart of Britain’s newspaper industry.
The old febrile buzz is long gone, along with the news organizations that once lined the narrow London thoroughfare.
It was hard not to agree with Roy Greenslade, a veteran media correspondent, writing in The Guardian this week.
“For those of us who spent years working in and around Fleet Street it is sad to go back,†he wrote, “especially since the most frequent reason to return is to attend funerals and memorial services at St. Bride’s church.â€
Countless obituaries for London’s Inky Way have been written since Rupert Murdoch led a steady exodus from the neighborhood by relocating The Times of London and his other newspapers in 1986 in the course of a bruising war wth the then-powerful print unions.
This week the BBC threw another spadeful of dirt on the grave by decreeing in its latest style guide that Fleet Street was no longer a useful synonym for the print media.
Mr. Greenslade hoped the broadcaster’s diktat would be cheerfully ignored by its employees.
Fleet Street was home to the British press for 300 years, and the name is likely to linger as shorthand for the industry for as long as its journalistic ghosts continue to haunt it.
The bigger question, in Britain as elsewhere, is whether newspapers will survive as tangible printed products or whether output will eventually go exclusively online. At least one prestigious European title is actively considering whether to make the leap.
In an era of Twitter and 24-hour broadcast coverage, it might appear to make little sense to continue selling a p! roduct that offers yesterday’s news.
But newspapers have somehow managed to survive predictions of their demise.
When I started out in the late 1960s, a venerable copy editor â€" he was old enough to have covered the Spanish Civil War â€" marveled that anyone should opt to join a dying industry.
He confidently predicted that, within a decade, readers would be receiving their news via teletype that would spew from a box located beneath their television sets.
He may have been a bit off the mark with the technology. But his belief that some kind of radical change was in store matched that of contemporary media gurus such as Canada’s Marshall McLuhan, who foresaw how new methods of communication would change how people viewed the world.
The Internet is just one technology that has since changed the game for journalists and their employers. Cell and satellite phones now ensure instant communication between newsdesks and their reportes, wherever they are in the world.
That has increased the pressure to respond instantly to the latest breaking news, sometimes inevitably reducing the time for what we used to like to think was cool journalistic reflection.
That is not to say that deadlines were not always an issue.
Once upon a time, you never left the office without a pocketful of change for the phone booth or, if the assignment was to some wild foreign outpost, without a wad of cash to bribe a telex operator to jump your copy to the top of the pile.
My colleague Alan Cowell has written how, as a Reuters correspondent in Africa, he once resorted to carrier pigeon to get his story out.
The other golden rule was that you didn’t get a story by sitting in the office. Some Fleet Street old-timers interpreted that as meaning they could sit out their shifts in a nearby pub and have the bartender med! iate thei! r contacts with the desk.
Nowadays, print journalists are more likely to spend their time soberly glued to screens, fielding developments online or via television.
Ray Snoddy, a veteran British media watcher, lamented back in 2007 the emergence of a new newspaper culture created by downsizing, lower wages and multi-skilling.
“Newspapers are becoming the new slave traders,†he said, “and journalists will become people who never get out and are attached to a computer screen - and that’s the future of journalism and newspapers.â€
He was speaking at one of those Fleet Street events where survivors gather, like miscreants returning to the scene of the crime, and inevitably end up exchanging anecdotes about the good old days.
Reunions can sometimes descend into mawkish remembrances of times past in which, through rose-colored spectacles, the older generation looks back at a golden age of efortless “hold the front page†exclusives, hammered out on ancient typewriters in a glorious miasma of cigarette smoke and booze.
Maybe it wasn’t quite like that. Still, the old Fleet Street, a 24/7 bottleneck of newsprint trucks, thundering presses, crowded pubs and all-night cafes, did have a certain something.
That’s all gone. But even now, for journalists of a certain age, the smell of ink can be as evocative as the smell of greasepaint to an actor.
