UNDEAD!

Though it will be 10 years on Monday since they shut down the old Los Angeles Herald Examiner, its big vertical sign still hangs, gathering soot, at Broadway and 11th Street. There’s the same grimy loading dock, the same casbah dome on the rooftop. Inside, shafts of sun catch the dust motes as they float through the Julia Morgan-designed lobby, under the soaring arches and over the cheeky cherubs on the wall relief.

The newsroom on a recent day was still all metal desks and dingy linoleum. In what used to be the editor’s office, an award plaque hung crookedly, giving runner-up status to a typically dainty Her-Ex report on “KIDS WHO KILL THEIR PARENTS” from 1984. To glimpse it was to remember the surreal tone that interviews tended to take on, back when the room was filled with ink-stained scribblers (“How’d you do it?” . . . “Baseball bat?” . . . “Took away your Malibu Barbie? Sure, well, who wouldn’t be frosted?”). You could almost imagine someone still in there, batting out one of those lurid missives that were the Herald’s bread and butter. But no. The building is a movie set now.

Newspaper convention dictates that headlines be marked on their 10-year anniversaries. Ten years ago on Nov. 1, a man from the Hearst Corp.’s New York office walked into the Herald Examiner newsroom at 1 p.m. in a dark suit, clambered onto a desk, pulled out a piece of paper and performed a different, newer type of newspaper convention, the kind that involves severance pay and the words “it is with great regret.” No more underdog scoops and falling-apart presses. No more yelping headlines--”WOW!” or “LAKERS!” or “GUILTY!”--marking Olympiads and basketball championships and Night Stalker verdicts. No more editors sitting around, thinking up names like “Night Stalker” for serial murderers.

There were tears, many of them belonging to dear friends and co-workers; though, if truth be told, people had been scrambling for months to find less tenuous employment. The Herald had been losing something like a million dollars a month for a very long time. At that moment, though, convention dictated that the loss of the Herald was a death, a spirit silenced.

Convention cracks me up. For 10 years now, this city hasn’t been able to turn on a TV or eat its Wheaties without being assaulted by the supposedly dead spirit of the Herald. From CELEBRITY MURDERS! to NORTH HOLLYWOOD SHOOTOUT! to PRESIDENTS WHO BARE ALL FOR BRENTWOOD INTERNS!, the voice of 11th and Broadway has spent the past decade haunting us from the grave.

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You almost have to be among this city’s legions of Her-Ex alumni to fully grasp the irony in the timing of its demise. For L.A.’s last, best tabloid-style paper to go under just as the city--and the nation, for that matter--was entering a veritable renaissance of tabloid-style behavior seems in retrospect almost too cruel for words.

There was something about the Her-Ex, not only on its news pages, but in its very environs, that could make the whole world feel like one big, wonderful, half-true, cartoony headline. Even now, I can’t entirely vouch for the accuracy of recollections from my stint there. Did the place, in its last days, really publish a promotional calendar in which every month, including February, was 31 days long? Did the guy at the next desk really get kidnapped at an ATM one night, only to be ransomed for $18 and a peanut butter sandwich? Did they really once put the star columnist in a Christmas parade in a convertible and forget to hang the paper’s name on the car door, so that people on the street kept yelling, “Who are you?” to the poor, hung-over guy in the Santa hat?

Of course a lot of the fun stemmed from desperation. Cities change, and newspapers don’t like to, and the Her-Ex, for all its bluster, was conventional that way. Though there were many nails in the coffin, including a debilitating strike in the ‘60s, change--the stuff of news--was what finally killed L.A.’s second paper: a working class that fled to TV and Spanish-language radio and tract homes in Palmdale and Moreno Valley. By the time the Her-Ex woke up, it was too late.

And yet, conventions exist for a reason. There is a market for the false security in celebrity worship, for the cheap rush of crisis without human complexity. No sooner had the Herald died than pieces of it started surfacing in heretofore unthinkable places: “serious” newspapers. Web sites. Cable TV. So the New York Review of Books has done O.J., and Princess Di’s paparazzi have made Ted Koppel, and that Oval Office cigar has been debated on CNN. “SO LONG, L.A.!” the front page hollered 10 years ago. But a personal theory, fraught with so many mixed feelings, is that the spirit of 11th and Broadway even then was cackling over the punchy, one-word anniversary headline it surely deserves . . .

Shawn Hubler’s column runs Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.