What we mean when we say we miss newsrooms

Meredith Cummings
5 min readMar 3

If my former newsrooms were people I would be attending many funerals.

My past lives fall around me. My first journalism job was at The Birmingham News in Alabama, which recently stopped printing. So did other papers in my home state, The Mobile Press Register and the Huntsville Times. The Tuscaloosa News, where I worked when my daughter was born, said goodbye to its building and my former co-workers gathered at the wake. Overall, 2,500 newspapers in the United States have closed since 2005. The country will lose one-third of its newspapers by 2025.

Meredith Cummings

Freelance journalist, Teaching Assistant Journalism Professor at Lehigh University