COLUMN: A Farewell Chorus For An Empty Newspaper Office

*This is an opinion column*

TUSCALOOSA, AL — The smell of dust, shredded insulation and diesel fuel mixed on the crisp autumn breeze as I stood behind a temporary chainlink fence off of 3rd Street in Tuscaloosa and watched a once-proud institution torn down piece by piece.

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The former Tuscaloosa News building has been mostly vacant for the last couple of years after the city bought it, but the local paper of record still publishes six days a week (albeit off-site) with quality coverage and I'd go to the mat defending anybody over there today.

Roughly a decade before the Tuscaloosa Amphitheater, the massive yet understated black and white facade of the building — resembling a newspaper masthead — was one of the first sights to welcome countless people crossing the Hugh Thomas Bridge from Northport into the city for the last two decades.

The building seemed like it would sit there forever and made me feel a sense of the permanence and importance of the institution from a young age.

Designed by Chicago-based McClier Corp., the building was also quite the investment by the New York Times Co., with Tuscaloosa News Publisher Tim Thompson telling the community in February 2003 that the massive newspaper company had spent $20 million on new press equipment and $10 million on the design and construction of the modern newspaper office.

"As we began looking for a site, we knew we wanted to remain in downtown Tuscaloosa," Thompson wrote in the special edition of the newspaper that commemorated its grand opening. "We wanted to acknowledge our link with Northport and the rest of the region, and the opportunity to invest in west Tuscaloosa was a clear benefit. Our current site meets all those criteria."

This came at a time when the newspaper was under the management of the New York Times Regional Newspaper Group, which also oversaw the Gadsden Times and the Times Daily in Florence. It was the final golden age for print newspapers as paid circulation numbers soared across the country and newsrooms buzzed with activity.

Tuscaloosa CPA Kenneth C. DeWitt also praised the newspaper in a 2003 letter to the editor, saying that those in the business community were pleased the newspaper had invested heavily in downtown Tuscaloosa with its new building.

"It is indeed a new centerpiece of our revitalized downtown," DeWitt penned when the new building opened. "But the improvements in The News that I've noticed recently go much beyond brick and mortar. In the last few years, I have seen a renewed spirit of corporate responsibility at The News — evidenced by the increased participation of News employees at all levels in our community — civically, professionally and socially. But it was not always so. There was a time when we in the business community were extremely wary and in fact found ourselves at odds with certain coverage, and thus seemingly with The News itself."

This would prove a somewhat prophetic observation by DeWitt more than two decades later, as the building produced more journalistic talent in its short time than just about any other similar institution within 300 miles.

As an example: Aaron Suttles, a decorated sportswriter at the Tuscaloosa News and part of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize team, has since left the newspaper business and works as director of content for Yea Alabama — the NIL collective for University of Alabama Athletics.

Suttles worked for years alongside the late Cecil Hurt, a pillar of local journalism whose memory needs no introduction in these parts. As the building they once worked in was coming down this week, Suttles told me the first time he saw Hurt's desk, it captured his imagination and he knew he was home.

"The TNews building will always feel like Friday nights in the fall to me," he said. "Hustling back to the office to file a high school football game story from whatever outpost you were dispatched. The buzz of the sports desk alive with designers laying out the sports section and staffers fielding the ringing batch of phone calls coming in giving summaries of games that the paper couldn’t staff."

He also reflected on the building being the first place he had to get to after surveying the damage on 15th Street from the deadly and destructive tornado on April 27, 2011. He was a sports reporter, sure, but he also saw the mangled buildings, the bloody and battered survivors, and the path of devastation torn through the city that changed it forever.

The team's coverage resulted in the newspaper's second Pulitzer Prize the following year.

"When I think of that building, I’ll always remember Andrew Carroll and Cecil Hurt and Tommy Deas and Harold Stout," Suttles said. "It was my workplace home for more than a decade. There was the night we found someone passed out in the bushes out front from definitely a cocktail too many consumed. On concert nights at the Amp, the bass vibrating the walls. Putting the paper to bed, walking down those stairs that gave sight to the massive printing press, getting in your car and going to the Downtown Pub for a drink to take the edge off a stressful evening."

Another of these legends is my part-time mentor, dear friend and former Tuscaloosa News publisher Jim Rainey, who called the demolition of the building the "end of an era for our community" — a stark reality when taking into account shrinking local newsrooms across the country and the erosion of trust in traditional media.

"The building was both beautiful and functional," he told me. "While I’m sad to see its demise, I'm grateful for the Saban’s remarkable generosity. Their commitment to Tuscaloosa has enabled that space to continue to serve the community in a meaningful fashion."

As Patch previously reported, demolition work began this week on the building as the City of Tuscaloosa makes way for the Saban Center — an expansive and ambitious project that will serve as a state-of-the-art educational center promoting science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics, or STEAM.

The Saban family has put up $5 million for the project to date, with the Saban Center also complemented by a host of other partners like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Alabama Water Institute, the Westervelt Company, Shelton State Community College and Stillman College, to name a few.

You'll be hard-pressed to find anyone in the community who thinks it's a bad idea and the Sabans lending the family name to the educational facility is sure to give it a similar air of permanence to the "Tuscaloosa News" in large black letters on the facade of the old building.

Amid the rumbling of heavy machinery and gnashing of metal on Wednesday, I'd figured at this point in my journalism career that I'd be watching the demolition of the imposing Tuscaloosa News building with a beaming sense of triumph.

As a one-man news outlet covering my hometown who can remember when the building was first erected, I'd made the joke on several recent occasions that I planned to celebrate the destruction of the relatively new newspaper office much like dissidents dancing around the toppling statues of Saddam Hussein or Stalin.

I expected it to be a kind of leveling of the playing field in our local media ecosystem after several thankless years of gnawing and scraping like hell to get Tuscaloosa Patch off the ground.

It was to be the dawn of a new age, I thought — my time.

Instead of hooting and hollering Wednesday afternoon, though, I must admit my anticipated sense of victory gave way pretty quick to overwhelming nostalgia and sadness reflecting on the passing of an era and having missed out on it at the Tuscaloosa News.

Laboring under a persisting inferiority complex, I had cause to be bitter, sure, or at least I'd told myself enough times over the years that I did. But instead of beating my chest atop the rubble and declaring myself the new Local News Czar of Tuscaloosa, I found myself coming to terms with exactly what I was witnessing and not liking what I saw.

It was something of a dream for most of my adult life to work for my hometown newspaper and be the one to "do the news" for my friends and loved ones in Tuscaloosa County. I'm getting to do that now in a way, sure, and wouldn't trade it for anything — it's just not how I envisioned it when I was still working in the newspaper business.

The story I've often told on the civic club speaking circuit for years is that I even left a job I loved at the Weather Channel in Atlanta to become the executive editor of two daily newspapers a short drive from here in Mississippi, solely in the hopes of getting the experience to return home one day and become the editor of the local paper.

I spent four amazing years in Starkville but running the local paper in my hometown never came to pass and that's probably just as well, considering how rewarding it has been to see Tuscaloosa Patch grow over the years.

But it certainly wasn't for a lack of trying.

For years, I applied for every job that came available at the Tuscaloosa News and even once interviewed to be, ironically enough, the newspaper's opinion editor and a columnist before being politely turned down and embarking on a brief stint as a statehouse reporter for the Associated Press — a local interest factoid that was printed in the paper shortly thereafter when the AP announced my hire in Atlanta.

I'm grateful for that kind gesture and I'm sure my Mama still has the press clipping in a box somewhere.

Hell, just going into the building felt like a privilege to me at the time and on Wednesday I looked around for the office I once sat in for that job interview a decade ago, wearing a necktie and itching for an opportunity.

It's funny the little formative moments that stick with you over years of chasing your tail and ambitions in this business, and when this small memory scratched its way back to the surface, I knew I had it all wrong and didn't have the right to gloat over the ruins of the monolithic newspaper office that would never hire me.

"Lots of very talented people came through those doors and did important and inspiring work that will continue to have a positive impact upon our community for generations to come," former Tuscaloosa News publisher Jim Rainey reminded me.

This evoked memories of legendary journalism war horses of old who worked for the newspaper when I was still learning how to read.

Names like Cecil Hurt and Ben Windham.

It also reminded me of incredibly talented and celebrated journalists who are now my friends.

Among them is one of my favorite local news reporters in the entire state of Alabama: CBS 42 News Digital Managing Editor Drew Taylor.

He learned his craft burning up shoe leather in Tuscaloosa and told me the newspaper seemed to be its own universe, "one both simultaneously stuck in the past yet always looking to the future."

It would be a disservice to this story to chop up or condense what he said next, so here's Drew in his own words:

"The building that The Tuscaloosa News called home for over 20 years was more than an office. In some ways, it was a museum. Walking in, the first thing you would see would be a picture of Buford Boone, longtime publisher whose column decrying the racist attacks against Autherine Lucy for having the courage to be the first Black student to attend the University of Alabama received the Pulitzer Prize in 1957, both cased in a glass box. Black and white photos taken by folklorist Kathryn Tucker Windham of everyday people peppered the hallways, a reminder of the little moments so many in Alabama have lived. More than a museum, The Tuscaloosa News was a sort of ecosystem where you could see some of the finest writers in Alabama in their natural habitat. You could see longtime outdoors writer Robert DeWitt typing away, with a radio on the side and a picture of "Bear" Bryant and Pat Dye on a hunt. You could see Tommy Stevenson and his favorite hotplate, which likely wouldn't pass today's HR protocols. It's where you could see sports editor Tommy Deas taking a smoke break or two under a tree by the pressroom, or Mark Hughes Cobb working alongside some of his favorite knickknacks: his prayer candle of Kurt Vonnegut, an old photo of him and Charlton Heston and a concrete monster he once won from the Monster Makeover. At Jason Morton's desk, you'd find him surrounded by pictures of his family, the champagne bottle the newsroom drank from when they won the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News in 2012, and his trusty Batman coffee mug. It's also where the outsized mailbox of the late sports columnist Cecil Hurt, whose appearances in the newsroom were rare at best, always had countless letters from readers pouring out."

Longtime Tuscaloosa News reporter Jason Morton was also part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning team for breaking news during the deadly April 2011 tornado, along with Suttles, crime reporter Stephanie Taylor and the others who rose to the occasion when facing down the greatest tragedy in the city's history.

"In 2004, I walked into a newsroom that looked like a Hollywood movie set," Morton told me. "But it was real, and I was in it. And I, of all people, got to share a masthead with journalistic legends like Cecil Hurt and Ben Windham. I honestly thought that’s where my working days would end. My journalism career began in LaGrange, Georgia, but I came of age in that building, which my wife, Pam, described as looking like something out of 'The Fountainhead' when she first toured it. I couldn’t argue with that."

Like Drew Taylor, Morton's own words tell the story of the halcyon days of massive, bustling newsrooms much better than I ever could:

"Working in that building allowed me to buy my first house, and I raised my son — born just months after my hiring — for 18 years on what that job provided. So, whether it was covering a politician’s (now former) spouse removing campaign signs from the public right-of-way — she called me from a Temerson Square bar to defend herself — or the resilience of a community rebounding from the worst natural disaster it’s ever faced, I was constantly proud of the work we put out in black-and-white each day. From that structure, I gladly defended our reputation whenever it was challenged, even convincing an ex-Northport city attorney that no, we did not, in fact, care how the council voted — we’re just reporting what happened. And sitting at my desk, I was overwhelmed when an editor came by my desk and told me to 'buy a suit.' For some reason, I had been chosen by my peers to be among the five to travel to Columbia University in New York City to accept our Pulitzer Prize. That was the first, and last, suit I ever bought. So yeah, seeing that building come down is hard. Very hard. I know something beneficial to children, our community, and teachers of this state is going up in its place, but I don’t know when I’ll be able to visit that side of town. Whenever that is, I’m pretty sure it’s going to be a long while from now."

Ryan Phillips is an award-winning editor, reporter and columnist. He is the founder and editor of Tuscaloosa Patch and can be reached at ryan.phillips@patch.com. The views expressed in this column do not necessarily reflect the views of our parent company or advertisers.