John Roughan: End of era - Herald moves with times

NZME CEO Jane Hastings during the official opening of the new NZME Central building at 151 Victoria St. Photo / Dean Purcell

Building left to echo with memories as newspaper shifts after 152 years in central Auckland block.

It's not much to look at from the street. Its four-storey, curtain wall on Albert St is just the end of the short arm of an L that has its other end on Wyndham St. That entrance is even less distinguished, narrow steps between vehicle ramps. That was the tradesman's entrance. To toilers in my trade the Herald has always been on Wyndham St.

Not any more. When we left here last night, we would never come back. We're not going far - to a new, glassy building off Victoria St West, but it means that after 152 years, the Herald is moving out of the Queen St valley where it and Auckland began.

We will be just over the ridge, in a multi-media centre with Newstalk ZB and other radio stations owned by the same proprietor, now called NZME. It's moving with the times and I am not going to weep for the old building. It's as plain inside as out. But you can't come to a place every working day for as long as I have been coming here and not feel a wrench.

It is a rambling warren. Three or more buildings have been internally connected as the newspaper grew from its beginnings in Queen St to occupy most of the block behind. There are still passages where I have never been, rooms I have never seen. One of the lifts still has sliding grilles.

The printing presses have long gone to Ellerslie, leaving empty caverns in the lower ground floors, but the big internal loading bay is much as it was when we used to come here as students to catch the "Herald bus". A fleet of them, proper coaches with their rear seats removed for the papers, used to leave at an ungodly hour of the morning to reach every town in the top half of the North Island before dawn.

But not much inside the building is still as it was when I joined the paper in 1981. Countless refurbishments have moved internal walls and reshaped working areas. In those days the editorial operation lived entirely on Wyndham St, working on typewriters within oak-panelled walls, or is memory gilding the picture.

We reporters were on the second floor with sub-editors across the room and the library of filed cuttings through a door behind us. Teleprinters clattered in an open room by the subs. Directly above us the editors, leader writers and feature writers all had their own offices, "mahogany row". The sportswriters were up there, too.

It is the people you remember when you walk around the building one last time. Some of the names who made the paper what it was almost never appeared in its pages.

Chief sub Bert Nealon presided at night with loud humour and bursts of song.

The newsroom was largely a boys' club at that time and the conversation in the Shakespeare could be boring unless Bert was there, which he usually was. It changed within a few years while I was in Wellington. When I came back to Auckland later in the 1980s many more women were on the staff and we were going to the bar upstairs.

I came back to write editorials. Four of us produced three of them a day. We each had a room with a window on Wyndham St. The SkyTower grew in my direct view. A new building obscures it from the same window today.

I was working in that room late one night when Wilson and Horton's company secretary rushed in.

He had driven from his home on the Shore after receiving word that Brierleys had made a raid on the stock and were on the verge of a takeover. Michael Horton was on a plane halfway to the United States. We had to get word to him, which we did. He got the message at LAX and took the next plane home.

He went public, damning Brierleys' previous handling of newspapers, poisoning the takeover and lining up Sir Tony O'Reilly to buy out Brierley for a price we had to work hard to justify. But it is easy to overstate the effects of an ownership change. Wilson and Horton was a fine, friendly company, but it lived on Albert St and few from editorial ever went there.

Far more important changes were coming to newspapers at that time. The building had its ceilings lowered to accommodate an ocean of heavy blue cable to carry the electronic digital transmissions that would transform they way we work.

Around the turn of the century we were all moved to the third floor with the newsroom at the Albert St end. Looking around now, it's just a building that has seen many good people and some interesting times, but it is time to go.