‘It’s quiet in here now’: Saying goodbye to the historic, treasure-packed StarPhoenix newsroom

I’m sitting, as I write this, in the Saskatoon StarPhoenix newsroom on a weekday afternoon, at the desk I’ve occupied for a quarter century.

I’m alone on the vast second floor. The only noise, in this whole big space, is the hum of some distant machine, and one man tapping on his keyboard.

I can do whatever I want in here — yell, scream, dance, paint the walls, fall asleep. Nobody will know, because nobody else is here.

Journalists emptied the place out in March of 2020, stayed hunkered in our homes as the pandemic spread, and never came back.

One day, the newsroom was busy. The next morning, we got an email telling us to stay home for a few weeks. And now the old building is up for sale, and Saskatoon’s daily newspaper will soon have no fixed address.