[DAWN] Three decades after media mogul Rupert Murdoch instigated its demise as the centuries-old home of Britannia’s newspaper industry, London’s Fleet Street bade farewell on Friday to its last two journalists.Fleet Street once housed thousands of news hounds, editors and printers working for the country’s biggest national papers as well as international and provincial publications. While the British press is still collectively known as "Fleet Street", there will no longer be any working journalists there after the Scottish-based Sunday Post newspaper closed its London operation.
"It’s a far sadder day for journalism than it is for me personally," said Darryl Smith, 43, one of the street’s last two "hacks". "Journalism is no more in Fleet Street."
The thoroughfare became synonymous with publishing from 1500 when Wynkyn de Worde established a printing press. The first daily newspaper, the Daily Courant, was launched in 1702.
In the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral, the street was ideally located for journalists, being in walking distance of the city’s financial district, the Royal Courts of Justice and politicians in Westminster.
Murdoch, who bought the News of the World tabloid in 1969, was at the heart of the street’s decline when in 1986 he moved his newspaper stable, which by then included the Times and Sunday Times broadsheets and the Sun tabloid, to a new purpose-built operation in east London, where new technology replaced the hot metal printing presses.
Within three years, all other national newspapers had followed, anxious to cut costs in an industry now decimated by the growth of the internet. Journalists have long departed the old Rooters headquarters at number 85, now the site of a smart restaurant.
Nowadays the street that once echoed to the sounds of clattering typewriters is the haunt of bankers and accountants; the Art Deco building that once housed the Daily Express is now home to Goldman Sachs.