The signs went up Monday.
The Citizen building at 150 Brunswick St. is for sale.
Don't panic.
The newspaper isn't closing just a few days after its flag was raised at city hall in recognition of its centennial. The huge birthday cake we cut up and served to residents who came down for Summerfest on Sunday didn't bankrupt us.
The press building, located across the street at 145 Brunswick, is not for sale.
As is the case for many newspapers across North America, our headquarters are just too big for us now and we need to downsize. On Saturday, the Boston Globe sold the building it has occupied since 1958. The Vancouver Sun and the Province moved out of their facility on West Broadway years ago for a few floors of a downtown office building. The massive Calgary Herald building along Deerfoot Trail, perched like a bunker on a hill looking towards the downtown skyline, has been for sale for three years. It is nearly 400,000 square feet or about four Costco warehouses in size, housing both the offices and the printing plant.
The Citizen, like those other publications, simply doesn't have the number of employees it had in years past. Part of that is the industry-wide decline in revenues and subscribers over the years but technological change has played an even bigger role.
Back in 1963, when The Citizen building was designed by architect Trelle Morrow and building by Dezell Construction, many more people were needed to do by hand what computers do today. At the Citizen, there used to be banks of drafting tables, where cut and paste artists painstakingly put together each page, gluing each element onto a page by hand. Today, a handful of newsroom editors and graphic designers using computers assemble news pages and display advertising that once took two dozen staff members all day to do.
Darkrooms and newsroom libraries are no longer needed, nor are large storage rooms devoted to photo negatives, prints and financial records, not to mention archiving the actual newspaper. All of that information is now saved digitally on servers.
Architecturally, Morrow designed his building to last.
It helped that W.B. Milner, The Citizen's owner from the mid-1950s into the early 1970s, owned lumber and sawmill operations. No expense was spared when it came to wood. When Citizen staff were taken on a tour of the Wood Innovation and Design Centre when it first opened downtown, the builders proudly showed off the innovative laminated wood beams supporting the new structure.
We just smiled and nodded.
Each day, Citizen employees can stand in the main part of this building, look up and see the unsupported heavy laminated spruce beams holding up the roof. They look as strong and resilient as they likely did when they were installed more than 50 years ago. That 1963 building, which also housed the press in those days, was built for $500,000 or about $4 million in today's dollars.
When finished, The Citizen hosted an open house on Nov. 23, 1963 to show off its state-of-the-art headquarters. Hundreds of residents and dignitaries came out, no doubt asking about the capabilities of the new press, which had printed a massive headline in red in the previous edition before to capture the news the day before that had rocked the world.
PRESIDENT KENNEDY DEAD, it read.
Once The Citizen building is sold, the newspaper's offices will be on the move. We have our eyes on a few spots but we promise two things about our next location. We will remain downtown and street level, as The Citizen has been since the day it opened its doors a century ago.
It will be a sad day to leave this place.
Although the building has aged, its bones are solid and the location along First Avenue is ideal.
Inside, the walls have seen and heard many things over the years but mostly the sound of laughter from a group of devoted employees enjoying working together to build something brand new each day for Prince George and its residents to use and enjoy.
It may be time to go but this building has been a fantastic home to The Citizen for more than half of the newspaper's existence.
Moving day, when it comes, will be bittersweet.
-- Managing editor Neil Godbout
