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.

It was in those buildings I looked for salvation in the form of a career I could love. I found that and friendship and love and trial by fire. I also learned not to use cliches like “trial by fire.”

I’m not sad about these changes but I miss those newsrooms. Buildings fall. People grow up. Technology changes. Isn’t that how we know we are alive?

I tell journalists who speak to my university classes not to look back.

“Students don’t care what we used to do,” I remind them. “They are moving forward. Do not — do not — talk about how things used to be.”

I put on my stern professor face. I don’t blink.

But when we — the old folks we never thought we would be — talk about newsrooms as institutions, they are unrecognizable. One of my former students wanted to know: Why do we seem to miss old-school newsrooms so much?

I told her I didn’t have an easy answer but that I would think about it and try to write it down. So here we are.

How did things used to be? I almost can’t remember. Yet it is there, faint like a darkroom-developed picture in the black-and-white recesses of my heart. I remember.

I believed our newsroom was a kingdom called Justice.

It was our personal fiefdom named Truth.

Our laws were built on Fact and Empathy.

We all wore a crown there, even if many of us didn’t fit anywhere else. We came from near and far to tell stories. Some of us escaped Bad Places and Mean People. Others chose to be in those rooms and had always wanted to be.

We all wanted to feel like we belonged. There, some of us did.

If you were part of a marginalized community you may not miss those experiences. I acknowledge that there were good parts yet there were other parts. Newsrooms during these times didn’t always give everyone reasons to look back fondly.

Holding truth to power has never gone out of style and some of the best journalism in America today is done by students. Students using different technology than I did. Different doesn’t mean worse.

Students and new journalists, let me tell you what we mean when we say we miss newsrooms:

We miss the noise: Ringing landlines. Fingers banging on typewriter or keyboard. Shouts across the newsroom. The squelch of police scanners. Hubbub.

The rattle of Tylenol and Tums containers being passed around. Yes, we even miss that.

We miss the off-kilter jokes. The foul language. That guy that always had a bottle of whiskey or scotch in his drawer.

We miss looking each other in the eyes.

We also miss the conversations that passed between and among us with no words necessary.

We miss the same citizens stopping into the newsroom each week to complain about something entirely out of our control. “My paper is in the bushes,” was a routine refrain. We miss those annoyances. We miss those laughs.

We miss the fights with authority; professional yet biting.

We miss the stonewall looks at our disposal we would dole out that said, “I have the power of the press behind me.”

We miss the respect that commanded that power.

We miss the turned-over takeout containers lying about the newsroom and bleary-eyed nights.

We miss the disgusting coffee maker.

We miss meeting community members face-to-face through handshakes instead of texts and social media.

We miss huddling together to watch a political race unfold on a tiny, beat-up old TV.

We miss the rattle of the presses running. We miss pulling a paper off the press and inhaling the fresh ink.

We miss the newsprint on our hands.

We miss — if we stayed very late or arrived obscenely early — the circulation trucks lining up like toy soldiers outside the building, ready to take our stories to the people.

We miss laughing at our colleagues when they did something funny. No one filmed it. We stored it as fodder for later memories, like now.

We miss the 12-hour news cycle. God, do we miss the 12-hour news cycle.

We miss the walls, steeped in cigarette and cigar smoke, and the stories we imagined they could tell.

We miss stories of newsroom romances and darkroom trysts, told over late-night drinks after work in that same bar we always went to.

We miss cheering on our coworkers to finish that in-depth story they had worked on for years. We miss wishing we were the ones to break that story.

We miss the competition of two- and three-newspaper towns and cities.

We miss the loyalty that came with knowing each colleague had our backs, any time. No questions asked.

We miss the feeling of walking in each day and feeling more at home than we did at home.

We miss each other.

***

Why look back? Students, let me tell you (because one day you, too, will look back):

These memories allow me to be my fearless, ignorance-is-bliss self. They allow me to imagine what it was like to have my whole life ahead of me instead of more of it behind me.

Do I want to go back? No. The Internet was a gift to humanity.

Yet these memories give me the profound power to crack open that part of my mind where everything I thought was fleeting and absent is, once again, front and center. Things now are different but not bad. Justice, truth and storytelling will always be enviable career traits.

Sometimes I dream I walk through the old newsroom door and everything I thought was lost is still waiting for me.

Was it worth it? Knowing now that we would lose it all?

It was. That is what we mean when we say we miss newsrooms.