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After 130 years the business publisher RBI is closing , once the biggest voice in the UK construction industry. Having worked there as a sub-editor and feature writer in the mid-90s it is a sad day.

The parent company has been on the block itself - job advertising has migrated to the internet, contract notices long ago migrated to the official EU journal, and on top of that the construction sector has been hammered in the recession.

So, goodbye CJ.

When I worked at CJ it was staffed, quite simply, by one of the most knowledgeable, professional and effective teams of journos I have ever seen. They were able to ring and get through to everybody who mattered in their industry - the bosses of the major house builders, the key ministers, the big civil engineering clients, the unions, the plant-barons.

The thrill of working at CJ was that there were two well-funded competitor titles: and who were constantly engaged in a battle to scoop, "shaft" and sabotage us - and the feeling was mutual.

Thus, though the subject matter was only contracts, claim, counter-claim, bankrupt house builders, collapsing tunnels and the construction death toll, the atmosphere on news days (it was a weekly) did at times resemble all those scenes in Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell's film, .

And what copy they wrote. I remember having to sub the following sentence about a backhoe loader produced by a Chinese company: "X has produced a cab in which the controls, layout and ergonomics are perfectly designed, provided you are just five feet tall."

I learned there how to read a company balance sheet and P&L account (ie with disdain). I watched and learned as the investigative team took down rogue builders and stayed one issue ahead of every trend in the management, finance and operational culture of the industry. I learned what a JCB actually does and how to keep out of the way of one.

I joined CJ during the brief but eventful reign as editor of Leon Clifford. Leon was one of those trade mag editors who live for two things: industry supremacy for the title and the thrill of the journalistic chase. Working for him taught me how you constantly have to struggle to shape, reshape and reshape again the page, the mag, the brand of the title.

And the CJ management's attitude to legal threats remains the benchmark against which I've judged all other editors I've worked for - basically it was "Go ahead punk, make my day".

I wrote the first big feature in CJ about e-commerce, in 1995 and worked on an early pitch that would have revolutionised online commerce in the construction industry: CJ proposed to launch a Treasury-sponsored bidding website for the burgeoning PFI industry.

It was squashed by competition: from an internal Treasury project and from RBI's own IT department who took exception to having those pesky files with the suffix ".html" on their precious unix server. This was at a time when journalists had neither web access nor e-mail as standard on their desktops.

At CJ we drank together regularly after work and on non-deadline days, throughout lunchtime. When I joined one veteran writer told me that he could drink 13 pints of Guinness at lunchtime and still turn in decent copy. I think I once saw him prove it too.

We launched regular mini-insurrections against the management on many things, but never once had to deal with pressure on editorial from advertisers. It was an RBI point of honour never to let the ad and editorial sides influence each other. Content was always king.

Sadly, for many of its titles, RBI never worked out how to make the business model it had perfected in print work on the web. It is the jobs websites and Google that have taken much of its revenue. But neither Craigslist nor Google nor the Jobs websites produce editorial content.

Increasingly it is impossible to make money out of news in the specialist trade journalism, so the scrutiny is diminished.

There is a lot of negativity around right now about the quality of local newspaper journalism. has had a justified pop at the dire state of the local papers we are all supposed to treasure and defend in the name of local democracy.

However, with the trade press it was always different: when you are writing for specialists and managers you just cannot cut editorial costs. The need to employ experienced journalists with high standards means you simply cannot reduce a trade magazine to one guy with a Samsung digital camera and a laptop, as some local news "empires" do. So the need to actually produce journalism gave the trade magazine model very little room for financial manouvre,

I'm glad to say that many of my former CJ colleagues ended up running trade journals in the rising sectors of the economy: a whole bunch of them now work for leading mobile telephony websites and magazines. Another became famous for investigating terror-linked Islamists. And as for me, I've ended up knocking out blogs and occasionally appearing on Newsnight.

And although I can assure you Guinness no longer plays a part in the editorial process, I still use almost every other skill I learned at CJ.