Technology in the newsroom

My first shop was using cut and paste methods. This was 2.5 years ago.

 

Amazing how in the mid 1980s all the copy was printed, cut and pasted down in composing. Three editions each night.

And we still did just as well or better on deadline as we do now.

 

Couplers were the worst pieces of crap ever invented. Once our tech guy handed me the phone lines that could clip one end into my Trash 80/100 and the other into a phone jack, things went pretty well. But I remember a staff cohort who insisted on using couplers and going ballistic in press rooms when they failed for the 9th straight time. I never understood why he did that to himself.

 

In risk analysis, there's an effect where something being safer causes people to take more risks - bicycle helmets lead to people cycling more recklessly, anti-lock brakes and seatbelts lead to people stopping more abruptly and driving faster, etc.

By the same token, technology to get the job done quicker just makes people slack off more before they actually start working.

 

That, and back then, SportsJournalists.com was a 1-900 number.

 

I remember that there was a "backshop" or "paste-up", then.

Once the story was written and edited, it was in someone else's hands (until the final proof).

Now, we are the backshop.

I also remember back when, to send a photo, you had to strap a print to a spinning drum. Eight minutes for B+W, 24 minutes for color.

Baaaah! Get the hell out of my yard!

 

yeah, we got chewed out a lot for calling Sportsphone because AP moved scores just too damn slow...

 

In high school and junior college, we used hot type from a linotype machine. (SIDEBAR: when I just typed linotype, the computer put the squiggly red line under it to indicate a misspelled word.) I learned how to read upside down and backwards to help with the page proofing.
Major college used punch tape and pasteup boards but the writers used typewriters.
First professional job it was still typewriters/punch tape.
Then the telecopiers came along. Still had to use a typewriter, then send the story to the office via the telecopier at either 4 or 6 minutes per page. The QWIP (sp?) version was smaller and in the case you could fit a bottle of Jack Daniels.
Then it was the ungodly teleram. A gigantic blue metal contraption about the size of a suitcase, plus the phone modem thing that was the size of a shoebox plus about a mile of cords. That was fun taking it on the road.
Then there were portabubbles. My company went with the Texas Instruments version, which printed the story on thermal paper and had the couplers built in, but they wouldn't work in a noisy stadium/arena.
The TRS80s, in my opinion, were pretty good. The biggest problem was only having about 6 lines of type available on the screen. But I had very few instances of losing stories or failed transmissions once we figured out how to use the phone plugs instead of the cups.
Oh, the memories.

 

I'm still looking for a photog who misses Friday nights in the darkroom, on deadline. I sure as hell don't.

Let's see what there is to miss:

* Having to leave games at halftime just so you could have film/prints developed by deadline.
* Not knowing if any of the action shots you think are good will be sharp, well lit, etc. This is why so many "coach talks to players" shots appeared in small dailies.
* And best of all, the knowledge that while rushing to develop your film, one mistake such as a light leak or bad chemical temperatures could wipe out a whole night of work.

All that being said, if someone asked me to shoot sports this weekend on my trusty ol' Nikon FM, I'd do it in a heartbeat. Those were fun assignments.

 

One night around 1:30 a.m. -- we were an afternoon paper at the time -- the 'z' key got stuck in the teletype and I arrived around 6 to separate the wire copy, only to find yards and yards of nothing but zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Thank God we had punch-type as backup.

 

You sound like me now. Never will grasp how all this technology just keeps moving the deadline up, when it should be moving the deadline back, giving us more time to produce better pages/copy.

Especially considering how fast we can get it from our desk to the printer out the door.

 

The only advantage to couplers over the wires you plugged into a phone outlet was that you could use couplers with pay phones -- which I did a lot.

But, man, did those fairly simple and seemingly sturdy pieces of equipment fail often.