Reuters, journalists say farewell to Fleet Street

updated 3:47 p.m. ET June 16, 2005

LONDON - A London tradition spanning three centuries is ending as Reuters abandons Fleet Street — the longtime home of Britain's scribes — capping a transformation that has seen the entire industry move to cheaper, less-fabled quarters.

The move by Reuters, the last major British news company to call Fleet Street home, closes an era when the booze-fueled reporters of a male-dominated industry would sidle up to local bars with sources, colleagues, and competitors alike. "If you wrote rubbish you were shouted out of the pub the following day," reminisces one.

"Fleet Street as a geographical home of the press is now a deserted village, full of memories everywhere," Canon David Meara said at Wednesday's ceremony to mark the departure in St. Bride's, the traditional journalist's church.

While the new, faraway offices may be able to house modern printing presses, critics say they lack the character of Fleet Street — a stone's throw from cathedral, pubs and monuments. In a telling reflection of the new era, the building that once housed the venerable Daily Telegraph is now an investment bank.

Fleet Street had ‘film noir glamour’
"What Fleet Street had was a certain film noir glamour," said Kim Fletcher, editorial director of the Telegraph Group. "Being film noir is slightly seedy, but certainly exciting. It was something of a Runyon-esque society — reporters might still be wearing trench coats and they might still be drinking too much.

"This was not a time when journalists went jogging on their lunch hours."

Papers such as The Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mirror lined Fleet Street in massive buildings. At night, vans clogged the streets to collect the day's papers and begin distribution.

"You were intimately connected to what you were doing," Fletcher said. "The buildings would start to shake when the presses started. It's become much more of a respectable white collar profession today, just because you're disconnected from the industrial muscle of those printing presses."

Technological advances made newspapers less expensive to produce and enabled a shift in production from in-house publishing plants to regional printing centers. Media companies began heading to cheaper and more modern quarters outside Fleet Street in the 1980s.

Today, the area is a legal and banking center, with international finance firm Goldman Sachs now housed in the former Telegraph building.

"You can practice journalism anywhere," said Mike Molloy, editor of the Daily Mirror from 1974-84, and editor-in-chief until 1989.

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