The way it was

At my last stop, a bunch of the old people were still sitting where they were used decades ago.

 

I remember talking with a friend who went from the San Bernardino Sun to USA Today when it was starting. They grabbed people from all of their papers to go live in Virginia and staff the paper. Gannett bought sort of a dorm to house the newcomers. The rooms were small so they called it "a stay free mini pad." The guy also said that it was weird for him to leave the office and not be able to grab a newspaper on the way out.

 

Remember when a full media workday consisted of a single retweet titled, WHOA?

Yeah, me neither.

 

Some time in the mid-90s, before everything went digital, I covered the state high school track meet in Norwalk and there was a shooter from a Bay Area newspaper group going through negs on a laptop in the press box and sending the good shots to the desk. He said they took the film to a local photo shop with instructions to "Just develop it. Don't make prints."

 

Back when we had an AM and a PM, somebody came up with the idea of doing a special section to tell the public exactly what went on at our place. They had a reporter start when the first of the PM crew came in at o'dark thirty and followed the whole building through the day and night. It chronicled the different departments and finished when the press crew knocked off after printing the AM. It was a really well-done piece and showed how vibrant things were back then.

I also remember the powers that be deciding to give tours of our office to the general public on 3 or 4 consecutive Sundays. None of us rank and file folks thought there would be much interest. Was I wrong! I was there for the last day of the tours and, honest to God, the line of people went out the door. They just kept coming and coming. Now there isn't even an office. Everybody works from home, though there are a couple of small offices where circulation folks operate from that reporters can use if necessary.

 

Those early days of USA Today, whoa. Awful product. But they didn't have jumps! Or bad news, either.

 

We joked that they were hoping to win a Pulitzer for "Best Investigative Paragraph."

 

Our place was one of those that decided to follow the USAT format. No jumps. Short teaser stories on the cover and the actual story inside. That experiment lasted maybe 2 weeks.

 

We did it, too. The column and maybe one story could jump. None of the gamers. (Yeah, 8-inches on the Super Bowl.)
The sports editor had the right to OK another jumper, which he did regularly. Then it became almost daily as it became the joke of the newsroom.
We had one baseball beat guy who could writer 7-inch gamers that had a beginning, a middle and an end. He was remarkable. Most of the other just ended .....

 

I never worked for Gannett, but one of the most memorable USAT stories I can recall is when the newspaper canned several staffers for writing on its blue ball.
American Journalism Review - Archives

 

I was at a Gannett stop for about a year in 1999 and they still did no jumps. Actually would let a bigger story occasionally jump. I don't know the timing of the USA Today policy, but it stuck around for a bit.

 

The last paper I worked at had no jumps at all. And you couldn’t dog leg a story on the inside. Every little block of space had to have its own *story.*