A question from someone curious about what’s changed in newspapering over the years I’ve been involved with them made me think this week about how the tone of journalism has changed, but especially about the huge change in the process involved in publishing one every day.
When I first sat down to a battered, manual Olivetti typewriter in a smoke-filled newsroom, computers were still giant, vacuum tube-filled contraptions that spit out punched cards that we dared not “spindle, bend, or mutilate.” (You probably have to be of a certain age to remember that phrase — or, for that matter, what a vacuum tube was.)
Even back then, most people didn’t realize that the Standard Industrial Classification (the government list of who does what kind of work) coded a newspaper as a manufacturing plant — just like an auto assembly line, which it resembled.
In those days (the mid-1960s), the Lafayette Advertiser was typical of most newspapers. It was an afternoon paper with a deadline of 11 a.m. for its first edition. That meant an early start for the most junior editors, such as myself.
Every day at 4 a.m. we began to transform raw commodities, words and pictures, into a printed product that we turned over that afternoon to a kid on a Schwinn to deliver to your doorstep. There was a recognizable assembly line process. I typed a story, an editor laughed and sent it back to me, I rewrote it, and we finally agreed on words on paper that could be sent to a typesetter.
Only a few years before I got there it would have gone to a linotype operator who worked at a strange keyboard on a clunky, Rube Goldberg-like machine used to cast a, typically, three-inch-long line of type in hot lead. By the time I arrived on the scene newspapers had made a huge advance; the words were changed into Braille-like symbols punched onto long strips of paper. That speeded things along, but those strips still were fed into the old linotypes that operated at the speed of about a dozen lines a minute.
There was more than one linotype, of course, or we’d have never produced a paper. A newspaper column contained six lines to the inch and was 22 inches long. That adds up to 132 lines per column. There were usually eight columns to a page. A small edition had at least 20 pages, 20,000 lines of type. It would take one machine more than 24 hours to set that much type. Some big Sunday editions ran 100 pages. You do the math on that.
The words for headlines were sent to a man who set them by hand into a long “stick.” He pulled the individual letters from a two-drawered case. The big letters were in the top drawer, the Upper Case. Small letters were in the one below, the Lower Case. Pictures were sent to a photoengraver who used a toxic acid to engrave the images onto a zinc plate.
Meanwhile, an editor drew up page dummies, charts of what ads, stories, and pictures went where. They guided the men and women who would bring together long trays, “gallies,” of linotype lines, the zinc plates, and advertisements that had been prepared by other compositors, and place them into a square, metal page form. Each page form rode on a rolling table called a “turtle.”
Once the page was made up, it was rolled to the plate maker, who formed each page into a half-cylinder of lead that fit onto rollers on the printing press. Pressmen used a guide that showed which plate went where on the press and how to string the “web” of newsprint through the various rollers on the press. The plate placement and web configuration depended on how many pages there were in that day’s newspaper. The web was formed in such a way that the printed pages came off of the press in the right order.
When all was done, the metal used that day was dumped into a big melting pot and poured into molds to make new bars of lead (called “pigs”) that would be used to create the next day’s edition.
Today, two or three IT guys running two or three computer servers have replaced rooms full of printers and machines. In my view, that has not only changed the process of producing a newspaper, but also the tenor of what’s in them.
The physical limitations of the old process provided at least several hours in which stories could be honed, facts verified. There was also a geographical limit on how widely a newspaper would be distributed. Now I can type anything I want and send it, unchecked, to the entire world in seconds.
Lots of us graybeards like me wonder if that’s always a good thing.
A collection of Jim Bradshaw’s columns, Cajuns and Other Characters, is now available from Pelican Publishing. You can contact him at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.
