Uncovering artifacts when moving your biz news operation

Glenn Coleman, the editor of Crain’s New York Business, writes about moving during the long weekend for both Crain’s New York and the New York City offices of Crain Communications publications such as AdAge, InvestmentNews, plus a bunch of New York bureaus for various Crain’s publications such as Automotive News, Modern Healthcare, and Pensions & Investments.

Coleman writes, “Oh, the things you learn when it’s time to move to a new office building. For instance: Altoids mints have expiration dates. (Best if used by February 2007, the tin states, yet still curiously strong in February 2014.)

“These past few weeks, my newsroom staff has been filling Dumpsters with more than 15 years’ worth of yellowed reporter notebooks, dust-coated background files, never-cracked-open blue-ribbon commission reports and all sorts of scraps in preparation for the big move this past weekend from our longtime home at 711 Third Ave. all the way across the street to 685 Third Ave.

“‘What’s that?’ a 30-year-old asked as a colleague held up a cassette that showed the little brown ribbon of recording tape. The curled fax pages. The X-acto knife blades. The Bear Stearns notepads. The ‘Honk if you’ve been threatened by Eliot!’ bumper sticker. The November 1999 issue of Talk magazine (232 pages of pure stupid). The 1998 Forbes column that argued Michael Bloomberg should sell his company because it probably had peaked in value at $6 billion to $10 billion. (An expert quoted in the piece was one of Bernie Madoff’s kids.)

“The pearls from our purge offered younger staffers evidence that, yes, there once was a functioning world without Google and PDFs, and reminded older hands here that, yes, we are old. My favorite: an ancient memo from my predecessor Greg David, sternly reminding all reporters they ‘must file a Web news item each week.’ One Web news story a week? Most Crain’s reporters now file one story a day; some even more. And still we produce that newspaper, week after week after week.”

Read more here. In an email, Coleman said, “We moved across the street but it might as well be across the country for all the purging and packing we needed to do.”