Copyright 2008 Ben S. Pollock
I’m not nearly old enough to say I’ve seen it all, or even seen a lot. But when I worked there, my college newspaper, The Stanford Daily, had a noisy Teletype for AP and UPI stories, complete with increasing numbers of bells to rate degrees of breaking news. My first full-time job, news producer at KFJM, 1980-81, had a quiet upgrade, using heat-sensitive paper (still used in today’s cash registers), but it still had a bell to ding five times the night John Lennon was killed. Back to the point, the Times Record of Fort Smith, in 1979 when I interned there, already had a computerized newsroom.
Until a decade or so ago, newspaper owners everywhere jumped on every technology, usually as a way to make more money by saving money. Since then, we in the biz have been getting chompy (chomping at the bit then loitering at the gate). I didn’t quite understand this — and likely this exact thought has been Webbed out many times already. Until the other night I didn’t see this particular blind spot.
Because it is a blind spot: Every technological innovation taken by newspapers has been in the service of its industry, but with the latest tool, the Internet, the industry finds itself serving it.
One of the things newspapers pride themselves on — OK, their personnel, pulp has no known feelings — is getting last-minute news in. [I speak as someone who checks out local papers on every trip; this is by no means a riff on any hometown publications.] Newspapers have done this throughout the century of radio and half-century of television (rounded decades: Coast-to-coast radio is more like 85-90 years and nationwide telecasts with affordable TV receiving sets around 60 years).
We inky muckamucks have admitted from the start that radio has immediacy and TV moving pictures, but newspapers have details. And for a century — though ownership has concentrated like most industries — it’s continued to be highly profitable. Print offered entertainment and information differently from these popular wireless and inkless systems, where comprehensive storytelling, analysis and permanency (paper doesn’t crash) remained attractive to readers and the advertisers who targeted them.
Yet newspapers always strived to be faster for reasons of economic efficiency. Wire services as mentioned above moved from Morse code (a bit before my time) through Teletype then Internet transmission, though the last lacks those bells for true bulletins (as opposed to cable news channels’ continual, crying-wolf, “breaking” or “developing” events).
Each time presses gained speed and sharpness, a number of publishers placed orders for them. USA Today’s near-magazine quality color sharpness in the early 1980s motivated local papers to follow suit. Human typesetters were reduced to almost zero. Their jobs were taken by word-processing software run by copy editors. Those folks no longer got headaches from tubs of rubber cement, used to rearrange paragraphs cut or torn from reporters’ typewritten pages into sensible order — the origin of “cut and paste.” At the Daily, we keyboarded our stories on rough paper spooled into typewriters. Copy editors rarely did cut-and-pastes, mainly marking the typos and reordering sentences with soft-leaded Ebony pencils. A hired (we were students) typesetter keyboarded the marked-up copy into an electronic successor of a Linotype.
As typesetters departed so did compositors, who were replaced by desktop publishing software, run by newsroom personnel as well. Proofreaders will survive, thank goodness, like cockroaches.
Newspapers sunk thousands of dollars each time cameras got smarter. Digital photography for years was really really expensive. Now all it’s dropped is one “really.” For years editors shackled every reporter to a pager, now increasingly it’s instead a cell phone.
Waiting for a late story still has excitement. Even in 1955, say, you could hear late news on the radio (TV news was a camera aimed at an announcer) but a more complete story would be sitting out the next morning in your driveway. Maybe the biggest hang-up came from time zones. If a late battle report from overseas came over at 1 a.m. a single paragraph could run, but a 2 a.m. event, local time, would have to wait to the next day. Night games on the Pacific coast — same thing. That wasn’t so bad, because that extra 20-odd hours allowed time for comprehensive reports including initial reactions to be completed. In 1972 my big sister woke me to see George McGovern accept the Democratic presidential nomination on TV. Details on his speech had to wait another day for morning papers.
So it was last month with Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game. Newspapers still “stop the presses” for a minute or a half hour for late sports write-ups because they are so important to a vital subset of readers. Newspaper owners nationwide love laptop computers and wireless Internet connections precisely to cut minutes: A press standing by costs serious money quickly in overtime and other expenses.
I was proofreader the night of the All-Star Game, not an event that demands extra resources like the home team’s crosstown, cross-state or conference rivalry. Google News indicates most papers held the presses for the score, for wouldn’t readers look askance at “tie game at press time”? The All-Star is an exhibition game. It doesn’t move any team toward the World Series. It’s the best players of the American and National leagues in a gamey game. Full-service newspapers traditionally have made a big deal of it. Keeping things the way they always have been gets expensive. This year’s game went a record of nearly five hours, ending at 1:37 a.m. Eastern.
Even newspapers with online staffs don’t have the same enthusiasm for the Internet as for the latest cameras and phone caller ID. News and commentary can be just as complete on the Web as on paper. The old radio-TV divisions do not apply to the Net because the Web offers every medium: words, audio, and still and video photography. Many of newspapers’ own Internet sites offer news in heard and seen forms, not just read. The Net is not free, but we choose to afford it.
A separate line of the rather short, breaking All-Star Game article on my paper’s sports front advised print readers to go online — to its site — for more details. With luck, readers did that; they very well may have preferred cnn.com, espn.com or nytimes.com, The New York Times being a home paper of where the game was played, Yankee Stadium.
But from the point of view of readers, especially sports fans, well, in the last decade they’ve been moving online. Standing in one’s front walk having pulled the newspaper from its plastic sleeve (more efficient to skip rubber bands even in dry weather) and seeing a vivid still of a key early-inning catch, with a dominant headline signifying importance, is fun. The remaining people who enjoy such a variety of media are a retiring sort.
Newspaper personnel still drool over the next press from Europe or a higher-res image scanner — these tools know their place — but embrace the Internet like a sweaty but rich uncle. -30-
Liberty has been taken to revise this essay for clarity, chiefly the third and the last paragraphs.
