Last night I was transformed back to my newspaper days, long before the Internet was born. We went to see Tom Hanks in Lucky Guy on Broadway. He plays Mike McAlary, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and columnist who worked at the New York Daily News for 12 years. He became larger than life for his expose’ on Abner Louima, the victim of unspeakable New York police torture in 1977. The play was written by the late Nora Ephron, (May 19, 1941 – June 26, 2012) who wrote Silkwood, When Harry Met Sally, Sleep in Seattle, and Julie and Julia. The star-studded cast, Maura Tierney (his wife Alice) , Christopher McDonald, Peter Gerety, Courtney B. Vance, Peter Scolari, and Richard Masur all portrayed well-known reporters and editors who worked with him.

It has been 36 years since I worked in a newsroom. I started my career at Women’s Wear Daily, the fashion bible of the industry. While it wasn’t a city newsroom, the makeup was the same. Everyone had the desks connected to each other, people shouting information which formulated stories, cursing, back slapping, arguments over the leads on stories (and headlines,) and fierce competition for front page coverage. After hours, reporters were known for hanging out at the local pub where they smoked and drank way too much.

I have to admit that when I was watching the show, I was longing for those days again. It was one of those energized times when the most important thing in your life was nailing a story, kind of like a game show every day. The Internet has killed all that. The journey to get the story with a pencil and pad was so exhilarating. Google just doesn’t do it for you in the same way. The isolation of working from home, because you have Internet access, is just not the same thing as on-the-spot info being shared by co-workers. Life stories and life lessons are not the same in the virtual world.

Ephron captured what I am talking about in some notes shared in the Playbill.

Journalism: A Love Story by Nora Ephron“

But for many years, I was in love with journalism. I loved the city room. I loved the pack. I loved smoking and drinking scotch and playing dollar poker. I didn’t know much about anything, and I was in a profession where you didn’t have to. I loved the speed. I loved the deadlines. I loved that you wrapped fish. You can’t make this stuff up, I used to say.

“I’d known since I was a child that I was going to live in New York eventually, and that everything in between would be just an intermission. I’d spent all those years imagining what New York was going to be like. I thought it was going to be the most exciting, magical, fraught-with-possibilty place you could ever live: a place where if you ever wanted something you might be able to get it; a place where I’d be surrounded by people I was dying to know; a place where I might be able to become the only thing worth being, a journalist.

“And I’d turned out to be right.”

Amen!