Carl Bernstein surveyed the newsroom of the Washington Post for the last time. He began to address hundreds of fellow journalists but his microphone was not quite working. He repeated himself, stumbling momentarily over the words. Quick as lightning, Bob Woodward interjected: “You want me to rewrite it?”

The quip evoked a scene in the 1976 film All the President’s Men in which Woodward, played by Robert Redford, takes umbrage at Dustin Hoffman’s Bernstein rewriting one of his stories. It triggered a roar of laughter on what might otherwise have been a wistful day at this grand old American institution.

The Post’s building, where Woodward and Bernstein exposed the Watergate scandal and brought down president Richard Nixon, was being “decommissioned” after 43 years and will soon be demolished. By Monday, about 1,500 staff and 4,000 crates will have moved a few blocks across the US capital to a new, leaner office designed for the digital age, in which the Post claims to be enjoying a renaissance.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Washington Post newspaper office Washington DC. Photograph: Alamy

Like many purpose-built newspaper headquarters, the building at 1150 15th Street NW has served its time. A functional low-ceilinged box, it earned comparisons with Soviet architecture rather than the stately art deco landmarks of other American cities, or London’s Fleet Street. “I hated it,” wrote Katharine Graham, whose family owned the paper for 80 years, deriding it as “plain, dowdy and full of compromises”.

Yet few buildings have played such a seminal role in American history. It opened in 1972, a few months before a break-in at the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at Washington’s Watergate hotel and office complex led to Woodward and Bernstein’s revelation of crime and cover-up at the highest level of government (“Katie Graham’s gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that’s published,” US attorney general John Mitchell fumed). With Nixon departing in disgrace four years later, the Washington Post was directly responsible for the only time a US president has been forced to resign.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bob Woodward, Harry M. Rosenfeld, Carl Bernstein, Ben Bradlee in Alan J.Pakula’s film ‘All The President’s Men’ from 1976. Photograph: WARNER BROS./Allstar

All the President’s Men, directed by Alan Pakula on a studio set that meticulously copied the Post’s newsroom of the time – “They recreated it down to the trash,” Bernstein recalled – inspired a generation of journalists with its portrayal of the trade as both a noble and glamorous calling.

Woodward and Bernstein never looked much like Redford and Hoffman and now, four decades later, both are bespectacled and grey. “This paper grew into something that represents an incredible national Washington trust,” Bernstein, 71, said in his newsroom speech last Wednesday. “There’s something sacred about this place and what it does. But the room’s not important. It’s what’s been done here and what continues to be done here.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Reporters Bob Woodward, right, and Carl Bernstein, whose reporting of the Watergate case won a Pulitzer Prize, sit in the newsroom of the Washington Post in May 1973. Photograph: AP

“This is no day for sadness but about moving into a great new era in this institution that is a really sacred trust and represents everything about journalism, reporting and all that goes with it, especially the people that have gone with it, and I’m honoured to be here.”

Woodward, pointing to a spot 20 yards away where his desk used to be, showed equal equanimity. “It’s the passing of an era but it doesn’t change,” he said. “Democracies won’t die in darkness as long as institutions like this continue.”

Asked if a journalistic investigation like Watergate would have been harder to pursue in today’s era of instant news and tweets, the 72-year-old replied: “I hope not. I think it would have been driven by the reporters and the support would have been at the top. But we don’t know, we’re going to be tested, right? Who tests us more than Donald Trump?”

The decommissioning began with a local school band – 46 students in spangly costumes and tasselled blue and white uniforms – parading through the office, playing The Washington Post march , which was composed by John Philip Sousa in 1889. A short film was played and speechmakers nostalgically recalled the whiff of ink, clatter of typewriters, prolific smoking (“the place was just a cloud”) and, in the bowels, giant rolls of paper that were “the raw material of freedom”, and printing presses that “shook the floor” each night, while cars queued around the block ready to rush the first edition to the White House, officials, embassies and rivals.

Last to speak was the current executive editor, Marty Baron, experiencing a burst of cinematic celebrity of his own. The movie Spotlight charts a 2001 investigation of sexual abuse and cover-ups in the Catholic church by the Boston Globe under the editorship of Baron, played with gimlet-minded intensity by Liev Schreiber. “I can only rely on what the people who are my friends and my colleagues say and they use the same phrase: he nailed me,” Baron said during an interview. “I thought it was a terrific representation of journalism and how it’s practised.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Michael Keaton, Liev Schreiber, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, John Slattery and Brian D’Arcy in 2015’s ‘Spotlight’. Photograph: OPEN ROAD FILMS/Allstar

Descriptions of Spotlight as the best film about newspapers since All the President’s Men prompted Baron to watch the latter for the first time in decades. Did it make him sad to be leaving the place where it all happened, and where visitors have included Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama, Princess Diana, Elizabeth Taylor and Brad Pitt?

“No, it did not. It’s not a beautiful building. I think there are beautiful things that have happened in the building. The importance of the building is what it symbolises in terms of the history and the tradition of the Post and the ambitions of the Post and the integrity of the Post.

“The most valuable thing in the building are the people who are here and they’re not going away. They’re coming with us, thankfully. So I’m not wistful about the move at all because all of the things that are of greatest value are moving with us a few blocks away.”

Baron, turned down for a job at the Post in 1979, believes the essential craft of foot-in-the-door reporting is unchanged since Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate days. “I think they could have done it and they probably would have done it in the same way today because so much of what they did represented stuff that we still need to do today and should do more often: that is, getting out of the office, going to knock on people’s doors, talking to people in person, looking at documents, looking at police records, things like that.

“You have to do that today. I think that it’s a mistake to think we can all just cover the world by sitting in an office. That’s just not the way it works. You have to be a witness to what’s happening, you have to talk to real people, you have to get out of your comfort zone, you have to get out of your office.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Washington Post reporter Eli Saslow, centre, is feted by Washington Post Executive Editor Marty Baron and editor David Finkel after the Pulitzers are announced in the newsroom April 2014. The Washington Post via Getty Images’s Eli Saslow won for explanatory writing and The Guardian US and The Washington Post via Getty Images (Barton Gellman) shared the honour for for Public Service. Photograph: The Washington Post/Getty Images

Baron’s arrival in the editor’s chair two years ago is credited with reviving the fortunes of the Post which, like many American newspapers, had been battered by the digital storm of falling sales and advertising revenues. An Esquire magazine headline last month asked: “Is Martin Baron the Best News Editor of All Time?” . Tracy Grant, deputy managing editor, recalled Baron coming to her to discuss cutbacks and layoffs amid plunging morale, then asserting: “It’s the fucking Washington Post, Tracy. It’s time we got our swagger back.”



Grant added: “The impact that Marty had on the newsroom really was to get our swagger back. There is simply an expectation of excellence that he personifies that made us all remember why we wanted to work at the Washington Post and it’s sort of euphoric.”

Later in 2013 the Graham family sold the business to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, whose internet background brought fresh ideas and deep pockets. An additional 150 people were hired in the newsroom; there are now about 700 journalists in total. The Post’s web readership has grown dramatically over the past year and in October it overtook old rival the New York Times for the first time with 66.9m unique visitors on various platforms, although Baron admitted: “I can’t argue that we have cracked the code for every business challenge that our industry faces.”

The Post’s seventh home, occupying six floors of a modern building with marble-clad lobby overlooking Franklin Square, seeks to continue the upward momentum. Part of one floor has been cut away to create a two-storey central news hub lined with 21 screens that include news channels, the Post’s homepage and real-time counts of web traffic. Workstations by furniture designer Herman Miller include desktop power and USB sockets, a far cry from the dial phones and typewriters of yesteryear.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The One Franklin Square Building on K Street that will house the Washington Post newspaper. Photograph: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP

Photographers, videographers and social media developers will be spread through the newsroom, working side by side with reporters. There are audio and video studios with dedicated control rooms and four live shot locations. The offices span about 242,000 square feet, down from the 400,000 square feet of the old building, although managers say it uses space far more efficiently.

Publisher Fred Ryan, recruited last year from Politico, said: “This isn’t just a change of address. It’s a new chapter. We asked our team to design the 22nd century newsroom. I probably won’t be able to find out if they succeeded or not, but others will.”

But the past has not been forgotten. About 130 memorable headlines decorate the glass walls of meetings rooms. Quotations from the Grahams – “Journalism is the first rough draft of history” – and Bezos feature prominently, while the main conference room is named after the paper’s most revered editor, Ben Bradlee, immortalised on screen in an Oscar-winning performance by Jason Robards. Bradlee’s old chair, the conference table used in the newsroom during Watergate, the lead plate for the front page headlined “Nixon resigns” and the Gothic-lettered Washington Post sign will all be preserved.

The old complex itself, however, has a date with the wrecking ball, and will be replaced by a major new development for mortgage lender Fannie Mae. Grant, who decided aged 12 she wanted to work for the Post and joined in 1993, mused: “I walked in the building this morning and took a deep breath. I walked around the newsroom when it was quiet to soak it in. It’s our home.

“I think the important thing to remember is the thing that makes the Post are its people and its values, and those are coming with us. We earned this and we should celebrate this. That was the right newsroom for the 1970s and this is the perfect newsroom for now.”

Journalists can be a cynical bunch. But at Wednesday’s decommissioning ceremony, the Post’s longest-serving reporter, Martin Weil, told colleagues: “There’s room for sentimentality and if not now, when?”

Weil, who has worked for the publication for half a century, reminisced about things past then said: “When this building is only dust, and when the last dust particle has been blown by the wind, somewhere on this earth...”

Bernstein, amused by the purple prose, shouted: “You go, Marty!”

There was an explosion of mirth from the assembled staff but, undeterred, Weil pressed on. “We will continue to have our memories,” he said. “We will recall what we did here, why we did it, how we did it, whom we did it with. And how much we loved it.”