This morning it just looked big. The messy old desks had been replaced long ago by Spartan computer workstations. Reporters received regular admonitions to clean up their desks, just as they had in the old days, but the difference was that now people actually obeyed them. The desks and the walls and the carpets were all color-coordinated, in soothing shades that some consultant must have advised would keep the inmates calm. Perhaps it was my own fatigue that morning, perhaps a tiredness in the institution, but the newsroom felt a bit empty—a big, bland room, filled with frustrated people. That was what struck me, as I surveyed the rows of deskbound talent. There was so much cloistered ambition here, so many people reading their clips, marking time, remembering what it used to be like. As I walked toward Weiss’s office, I passed by my old friend Fred Applewhite, who had regaled me the night I met him in Abu Dhabi with the tale of how he had blustered his way through passport control at all the miserable airports of the Middle East by thundering the name of the Mirror and threatening devastating consequences for anyone who defied its will. He was writing obits now.

At least he was still writing. A few yards away was Arthur Finkel, another of the heroes of my youth—a man who could write almost anything onto the front page through the sheer force of his intellect, who was now laboring in melancholy obscurity as spot-news editor on the business desk—rewriting junior reporters’ rewrites of corporate press releases. “Hey, hotshot,” he said as I passed by. I lingered, thinking he might want to talk to me about the latest antics in the Middle East—Finkel was part of the club, after all, he had served in Beirut—but he looked back down at whatever press release he had been reading, and that was it.

They were scared, that had to be part of it. The buyout notice had frightened everybody. Newspapers are about immortality: the permanent record of events; the transcendent power of the truth. But we were discovering that we were impermanent, earthbound, a mere business, which had to make profits and satisfy the whims of stockholders. We weren’t prepared for mortality.

I rounded the bullpen and headed toward the executive editor’s office. Peggy Moran saw me coming and looked at her watch. It was 10:28. I was almost late. I could see through the door that Weiss wasn’t doing anything, but she made me wait a few minutes before sending me in. when I finally entered his office, Weiss closed the door, sat me down on the couch and gave me a soulful look.

“I knew this was going to happen,” he said. “I should have done something about it before.”