I took a break from the production of the sports section tonight to run an errand across the parking lot, behind the back of the newspaper.

It was 8 p.m., and twilight had long since turned into night, and as I returned to the newspaper campus. I found myself walking parallel to the windows on the south side of the ground floor, where The National has been put together since 2008.

The lights were on, and I found myself looking into the brightly lit newsroom, and it suddenly became an oddly emotional moment.

Inside, I could see everyone working one of the less desirable shifts in UAE journalism, a Friday night. But that’s what we do in daily journalism. We never close. Everyone works nights and weekends, eventually.

I could see the guy on the tech desk, and the people on the foreign desk, and as I moved along there were the sports guys in front of their computers, doing what they do. Not this word, that word. The photo here, the text there. This headline instead of that one.

And I could see the organized mayhem that is a newsroom. Papers and newspapers scattered here and there, sodas, bottles of water, cups of tea, posters, phones, dictionaries on desks. The signs of concentration as deadline comes into view.

No two newsrooms are the same, but all of them share that sense of directed energy and whiff of chaos.

It was a thoroughly familiar site. Normally, I see it/enjoy it from inside the room, but The National has big windows on the ground floor, and it was fascinating to watch it from outside, and watch discussions, rather than listen to them.

And I thought how very, very lucky I have been to spend the whole of my professional life in newsrooms, and the final two years of college, too … and what fantastic places they are, full of energy and passion, a place where everyone has a part in the thousands of individual decisions that go into every edition of a newspaper.

I know the lights are going out, in newsroom in many places of the world. That makes me sad. I want generations of newsies as yet unborn to be able to take a seat and participate in the give and take of deadline newspapering.

I wonder how many will get that chance. The lights were on, on a Friday evening in Abu Dhabi, and I could see the inside of my home.

Will they be on, here, or anywhere else, a generation from now? I hope so.