Jonah, newsrooms may have seemed like “sacred and magical” places to you when you saw them with your dad, but remember, you were a kid. A lot of the romance of the newsroom comes from its depiction in lively movies of the 1930s — “It Happened One Night,” “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,” “Libeled Lady” and the greatest of all, “His Girl Friday.” By the time you visited them, those newsrooms weren’t actually romantic in the least — they were run-down and dumpy, literally ink-stained from decades of proximity to presses and typography machines. The cigarette smoke and empty liquor bottles were certainly there, but trust me, there was very little glamor to them. These weren’t elegant smokers and martini drinkers. These were people having coughing fits before passing out drunk after lunch.

Having said that, yes, they were a lot noisier then. And there were and are great stories about the exploits of heavy-drinking reporters and editors and their gallivantery. But remember, the “magical and sacred” qualities the Seattle Times editor was talking about had to do not with the mad personal excesses of journalists but with the wondrous ability to challenge preconceptions and stand up to authority. As if.