I pressed the elevator button for the seventh floor. When I first joined the paper in 1981, it was a rush just taking the ride up. The elevator doors would open onto that massive map of the world, dirty with handprints as if reporters had pawed every inch of the globe looking for news. And above the map, the familiar row of clocks, marking the different time zones of the “empire,” as we referred to the rest of the world in those days—London, Paris, Beirut, Moscow, Delhi, Hong Kong, Tokyo. My only dream, back then, had been that I would someday work in one of those outposts for the Mirror. As it turned out, I had worked in three: Beirut, Hong Kong, Paris. I had become one of the people I dreamed about.

Now, striding past the map and the clocks, I entered the immensity of the newsroom: row on row of desks, manned by aging editors and cocky kids, each puffed up slightly from normal life size by the fact that they were part of the crew of this unsinkable schooner of the journalistic seas. In my first few years, I was excited just to cruise the room, steering my little dinghy alongside the foreign desk and the national desk and trying to make conversation with famous bylines. Maybe it’s because I was a kid then and found everything about the Mirror romantic, but the newsroom in those days seemed to have a magnificent decay. The desks still had clunky old typewriters, with messy ink ribbons and six-ply carbon paper. And the debris atop the desks had an epic quality: stacks and stacks of paper—the world still ran on paper back then—that conveyed the sense we knew everything at the Mirror. Every report, study and press release that had ever been issued was there somewhere in the great pile. But that was a long time ago.