Once upon a time — and not all that long ago — newspaper reporters could feel the ground beneath them shaking every day when the presses began printing the paper. Today, thanks to technology, the newsroom and the printing press might as well be worlds apart.

That functional separation is officially becoming physical this week, as crews on Thursday began pulling the old presses — all 1.3 million pounds of them — from the old Newspaper Agency Corp. (now MediaOne of Utah) building on Regent Street. They will be sold as scrap metal.

In many ways, the old-school newsrooms of movies — the foul-mouthed editors, hard-drinking reporters and shouts of "Stop the presses!" — disappeared long ago. In recent years, those abstract changes have been followed by more concrete ones as the physical places where news is put to paper have reflected the new technological realities.

NAC began printing the Deseret Morning News and Salt Lake Tribune miles away from the newsrooms in March 2006, when a new press facility opened in West Valley City. And the Tribune moved away from the presses before that, relocating to The Gateway in May 2005.

The three presses — two Goss Headliner Offsets that arrived at NAC in 1991 and a Goss Metro from 1979 — stand three stories tall and printed an average 200,000 papers daily over the past few decades, MediaOne daytime press foreman Dave Valdez, who has worked for the company for 26 years, estimated. Roughly figuring, since the Metro started operation, the three presses have likely printed more than 2.5 billion newspapers in total.

Since the new press building opened, the old presses — where countless Salt Lake schoolchildren on field trips had their first look at how newspapers work, where thick ink coated the walls, smells of chemical solvent filled the air and a familiar rumbling let you know the newspaper was being printed — have sat unused as symbolic reminders of days when editors and pressmen worked closely together.

Once the presses are gone, those days will become an even more distant memory — and not an entirely pleasant memory.

"It was a scary place," Morning News features writer Carma Wadley said of the press room. "It was dark, and it was dirty, and there were big, scary men."

Wadley, who started work at the News in 1971, has seen a lot of changes in the way newspapers are put together over the decades. She remembers when news pages were typeset with letters made of hot lead, and editing the final product often meant reading upside down and backwards.