It has been a long time coming. Still sad.

I worked at The Record back in it's glory days. The current Gannet produced 'newspaper' is a pathetic excuse for journalism.

We still get the digital edition and ask ourselves why everyday.

They are McPapers, as USA Today was once nicknamed. The Home News-Tribune and Asbury Park Press were McPaperized as well. Depressing as hell.

And other New Jersey newspapers have just disappeared: the Somerset Messenger-Gazette and its sister publications.

When were you at The Record?

I was there from 1980 thru early 1987. They were still in expansion mode. New color presses, going digital, targeted editions, a great newsroom. They were printing money too. Not every year was great but there were profit sharing plans and it was very employee friendly.

I started in marketing but moved over to a growing Information Technology side.

There was such pride among everyone who worked there.

I got out just in time. Things started to go downhill not long after I left..

Hard to believe the building itself is gone. The younger generation Borgs were(are) awful humans. They just wanted to suck every dollar out of the company. I think the paper sold for only $35-40 million (still not bad) but they owned the property and no doubt made a new fortune redeveloping it.

We used to envy the Record because their reporters had more creative leeway than the dry, dull reporting demanded at the Star-Ledger.

I worked in the Star-Ledger's Middlesex County bureau from 1979- to the mid-80s. Covered municipalities, the NJ Highway Authority, the NJ Turnpike Authority and Rutgers, not to mention every leaking toxic waste dump and hazmat incident. Went on medical leave for a while, then worked general assignment part time out of Newark until mid-1990, when my husband got a job in DC and we moved to Maryland.

Those were the days. The paper had maybe 100 reporters, a huge State House bureau, and bureaus in a number of other counties. A high-pressure newsroom filled with clattering metal typewriters, vacuum tubes to send copy, a big spike for killed stories on the editor's desk. Mort, Chick and Andy, the three top editors, in rolled back sleeves and green eyeshades. Cigarette smoke, shouts of "copy boy" and constant ringing telephones. Boozy reporters who drank lunch with their sources. Printers wearing their traditional square hats made of folded pages. The floor-shaking rumble of the presses. A ferocious night copy desk led by a man nicknamed the Slasher for the way he cut paragraphs from stories. Not many female reporters - I was one of the few in 1979.

The paper was thick with advertising and made good money. There were incredible holiday parties where people got bonuses of a week's pay for every year they'd worked, and nearly everyone got rip-roaring drunk and caroused until the wee hours.

After I left, they began offering buyouts and then doing layoffs, year after year. I'm thankful I wasn't there to see the decline.

But, I agree it's sad that there will be no more physical paper.

My company just made the decision to go entirely virtual. No more office. I've had a NYC midtown office since 1982. No more.

I'm in the intellectual property and production sides of the music business. It has changed beyond recognition.

I tend to let newsprint and magazines sit around too long.