How To Build A Newsroom Time Machine

[Warbaby]

Students attempt to put out a newspaper the old way - with typewriters, cutting and pasting copy, and processing photos in a makeshift darkroom: http://journoterrorist.com/2011/08/02/paperball2/

 

[Treetopflyer]

That's cool! Thanks for posting. As a photographer, I miss the old days of the darkroom. Although, with today’s technology, photography is much more affordable and I think that it opens the door for more people that would have otherwise been turned off by the "mechanics" of old school cameras and the chemicals of the darkroom.

 

[J.D. Hunt]

Warbaby, thank you for posting the story. As I came from the cut and paste world of layout and design, I found it interesting while teaching Desktop Publishing to give my student work teams an assignment and kill the power to their computers then hand them stacks of printouts and photos. Then I told them their deadline. They found out that a layout can be ready on time with cut and paste input and all of them thought it was a neat experience. J.D. hunt

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

That's cool! Thanks for posting. As a photographer, I miss the old days of the darkroom. Although, with today’s technology, photography is much more affordable and I think that it opens the door for more people that would have otherwise been turned off by the "mechanics" of old school cameras and the chemicals of the darkroom.

As much as I love photography I could never be an old school photographer because the odor of the chemicals for developing made me nauseous.

 

[LizzieMaine]

These kids with their futuristic technology. We printed our own school paper using an antique letterpress with hand-set type (the final year, we got to use a linotype machine owned by a local printer, which was yet another now-useless skill added to my portfolio.) Being the editor of the paper, it was my job not only to approve the copy and check the proofs, but I also got to supervise the actual operation of the press and the breakdown of the type after the run: once the print run was finished, the type would be broken out of the chase into a galley tray, to be redistributed to the cases. Except that time I tripped and knocked over a desk stacked with galley trays of type waiting to be sorted. It was a long, long night.

 

[dhermann1]

In eighth grade (1959-60) my shop class taught us how to hand set type from the good old California Job Case. How I loved it! Setting type by hand, letter by letter, was just a pure Zen experience. It was a wonderful feeling knowing that your hand knew exactly where in that big drawer full of letters each letter lived. And then printing up each individual page with a yank on the printing press handle. Like communing with Ben Franklin.
In 1971 I was working on the night shift for United Press International at the Daily News Building in New York. It was the real stone age of automation for the news industry. We received the daily stock market quotes and sent them to the Wall Street Journal in Chicopee Mass. We'd call them up, and when they picked up we would place the phone receiver in a big rubber cradle, so the little beeps and blips of data could be transmitted to their stone age computer. Probably all of 300 bits per second, if that.
At the same time UPI was experimenting with their first text editing system. The writers typed their stories onto a disk drive, which then saved it onto another drive. Then they would edit. Complicated system that drove everyone crazy.
I remember as a kid also visiting the local small town paper. I was really impressed by the linotype machine. What a monster. But it did the job.
Such is progress.

 

[Marla]

"...the ancient civilizations of the 20th century..."

???

 

[The Wolf]

Man, that story makes me feel old.

Sincerely,
The Wolf

-30-

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

These kids with their futuristic technology. We printed our own school paper using an antique letterpress with hand-set type (the final year, we got to use a linotype machine owned by a local printer, which was yet another now-useless skill added to my portfolio.) Being the editor of the paper, it was my job not only to approve the copy and check the proofs, but I also got to supervise the actual operation of the press and the breakdown of the type after the run: once the print run was finished, the type would be broken out of the chase into a galley tray, to be redistributed to the cases. Except that time I tripped and knocked over a desk stacked with galley trays of type waiting to be sorted. It was a long, long night.

Why do I get the sense that Lizzie may have been the inspiration for the Andrea Zuckerman character on 90210?

[video=youtube;nf0hDWOrnWA]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf0hDWOrnWA&feature=related[/video]

 

[Mr Vim]

That was a great article, and it cracked me up about the kids not finding the 1 key.

 

[hubbit]

These kids with their futuristic technology. We printed our own school paper using an antique letterpress with hand-set type (the final year, we got to use a linotype machine owned by a local printer, which was yet another now-useless skill added to my portfolio.) Being the editor of the paper, it was my job not only to approve the copy and check the proofs, but I also got to supervise the actual operation of the press and the breakdown of the type after the run: once the print run was finished, the type would be broken out of the chase into a galley tray, to be redistributed to the cases. Except that time I tripped and knocked over a desk stacked with galley trays of type waiting to be sorted. It was a long, long night.

"...We got to use a linotype machine owned by a local printer, which was yet another now-useless skill added to my portfolio." I had no idea that you were a veteran of the world of etaoin shrdlu. The new things one learns about friends and acquaintances even after knowing them for years upon years.

"Except that time I tripped and knocked over a desk stacked with galley trays of type waiting to be sorted. It was a long, long night. " This reminds me of a vignette Norman Rockwell did about a day in the life of a small-town hand-set newspaper. One of the scenes is captioned "Calamity"; the printer's devil had tripped with a fully set grocery store ad that was now scattered all over the floor.

 

[p51]

I worked for a newspaper in the late 80s-early 90s in composing and hated every second of it. The shift was either 2PM-11PM or 4PM-1AM. It was all computers back then but we pasted up the pages with huge galleys of type, a hot wax machine and large sheets that were slightly larger than the finished paper. Everything past printing out the type for the stories was all done by hand at that point. We all knew that ‘someday’ the paper would be fully paginated (the buzzword for totally computer created). Many years later I heard they finally eliminated the composing room and laid off most of the people I’d worked with. One of the happiest days of my life was when I quit the place (without another job lined up, that’s how bad I hated working there) and although I have never missed it, I have to now admit that it was an interesting experience.
Although I didn’t like the job, I was pretty good at the technical details. I could turn commas into periods and switch out text (it was much faster than going back and re-printing it out again) better than most, and when an odd request for cutting color screens or photos came around, I was usually assigned to it. Sometimes I’d run the machine that converted photos to halftone (color photos would turn out very different than the b/w ones) and we always had to use the proportion wheels. Near the end of my time there we got a halftone machine that you could tell it where to crop and put the border around it, which made life SO much easier as before that we had to put 1 point tape borders around every photo.
I recall we mostly hated putting weekend classified ad pages together and laying out borders for the ads. Sometimes the ads would be larger than the holes we laid out for them and got them in late, and would have to move half the page around for it. I haven’t thought of that in many years. No, I don’t miss it in the least!

 

[1930artdeco]

After reading this article I sat and thought...'Could I use a typewriter again?" After some practice....and I learned to type on the last of the electrics in high school. I love playing on the old manuals but would have to sit and think about some of the stuff for a bit.

Mike

 

[DesertDan]

My grandfather was a printer. His shop did custom run printing, business card, stationary, resturant menus that sort of thing. I remember seeing his shop once, I was a little boy at the time, I only remember big black machines which I assume now were linotype machines.

He also worked for the Miami Herald for many years.

 

[Red Tractors]

I'm a little surprised by this,

I'm back in school to get a degree in Commercial Photography at a technical/community college. Our art department must be better than most, because not only do we have a huge darkroom (Color and B&W!) I walked by a pair of printing presses the other day being brought in. That is on top of all the modern stuff in the place.

I'm taking a view camera class, (Which is a requirement) and to graduate you have to have a strong basis in darkroom. I think the kids I'm in school with could take on that project without all that much difficulty.

 

[TidiousTed]

When I studied graphic design back in 1975 to 1981 this was actually the way things were done. Dark rooms, type setting, Letraset and past up.
I think few professions have seen greater changes in the last 30 years than mine. Now I can sit in my studio and build whole books on my computer and send it right to the printers.

 

[Nobert]

I used to do layout for a few community freebies. Even though I didn't catch the days of photocompositing type, and did the layouts in QuarkXPress, our printer output the pages on 11x17 paper and then treated them as mechanicals. I could have done hand pasting had I had the time and skill (some of the other local papers did). They must have been one of the last places still using a press camera and rubylith, stripping negatives and burning plates the old-fashioned way. They shuttered in 2008, the same time the economy went belly up, and around the same time that the film companies announced that they would no longer be manufacturing high-contrast press film.