NewsBeat

16 NewsBeat March 2018 By BLAIR KAMIN More newspapers are departing their landmark homes, and why that matters rinter's ink still coursed through the veins of the structure where I landed my first real job in journalism — The Des Moines Register & Tribune Building, a beaux-arts high-rise that was later sheathed in modernist glass and metal. The place was an architectural mishmash when I worked there in the mid-1980s, but it burst with character. The fourth-floor newsroom shook when printing presses in the basement churned out copies of The Register, which billed itself as "The Newspaper Iowa Depends Upon." Sidewalk passers-by could peer through big glass walls and see those thundering machines and pressmen who folded newsprint into cute paper hats. Each night, small trucks would queue up at the building's loading dock, ready to ferry the first edition to the far-flung corners of the state so farmers and townspeople could read it with their morning coffee. Last year, that same 14-story office building became R&T Lofts, a stack of 164 rental apartments whose assorted floor plans have cutesy, journalism-themed names like "Scoop" and "Byline." The way for that transformation was paved in 2013 when The Register departed its home of 95 years to another downtown building where it's simply one of many tenants. And so it goes: Battered by the migration of readers and advertising to the web, and keen to milk valuable downtown real estate for much-needed cash, more news organizations are severing their ties with buildings that endowed them with a civic identity on a par with banks, city halls and courthouses. Their diminished architectural P stature comes at an especially bad time as President Donald Trump batters the media for supposedly reporting "fake news" and calls them an "enemy of the American people." Architectural visibility matters, even if its absence won't stop journalists from getting to the bottom of things. This shift came into fresh focus last month when Tribune reporter Bill Ruthhart and I disclosed that the owners of Tribune Tower, Los Angeles-based CIM Group and Golub & Co. of Chicago, plan to convert the flamboyant neo-Gothic skyscraper, one of the nation's great newspaper buildings, into condominiums as part of a plan that also calls for a 1,388-foot hotel-condo high-rise to rise behind the Tower. The Tribune is scheduled to move its newsroom to the old Prudential Building, a stolid mid-20th- century skyscraper just north of Millennium Park, before June 30. Some observers lament this fading of news outfits into the urban woodwork, saying it makes them seem less visible and more remote. "You couldn't move through downtown Des Moines or downtown Chicago without connecting these newspaper buildings with the community institutions they represented," Randy Evans, a former Des Moines Register editor and now executive director of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council, wrote in an email. "It's difficult to make that same connection when the newspaper is merely a tenant tucked into an office building somewhere." Like other businesses, newspapers have never shied from using architecture to advertise themselves. Not for nothing did Col. Robert McCormick, the Tribune's editor and publisher, shell out for the flying buttresses and pinnacles that adorned his storied 1925 skyscraper. Inspired by French Gothic cathedrals, the design by architects Raymond Hood and John Mead Howells suggested that journalism was a higher calling. Such ornate flourishes masked the underlying identity of early newspaper buildings: They were "vertical factories" where journalists wrote and edited stories, compositors set metal type, pressmen ran presses and a variety of delivery methods (newsboys, horse-drawn vans and, later, trucks) brought the finished product to a mass audience. The prime example: New York's "Newspaper Row," where a lineup of imposing towers, including Joseph Pulitzer's domed World Building of 1890, stood watch over the comparatively diminutive, City Hall. Each tower was a "palace of production as well as the headquarters that created a message on the skyline of the importance of the paper," said Carol Willis, director of New York's Skyscraper

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