Tech Talk: Technology Changes News

It was 1968 when I was recruited by the Buffalo Courier-Express to cover the Allegany County, N.Y. news beat. I could not have imagined what news technology would be like 47 years later.

Even then there was computerized typesetting, as it was called, and that was a change from the way things had been done, when my mother wrote the Portage Report for the Reporter Argus. She called friends and neighbors in the area, and they called her, and then she hammered out the column on her Remington Noiseless, and it was mailed to the paper unless someone was “going in to town” and would drop it off.

At the paper, that news and the other content of the paper were set in type by the Linotype, operated at great speed by a woman who seldom took her eyes from the sheets of copy clipped at eye level. The smell of hot lead blended with the smell of ink and the grease used to keep presses from seizing up.

Heads and ads were still hand set. Young Chuck Boller used to do a lot of that.

A few years later I became acquainted with George Questa, Pennsylvania bureau chief for the Olean Times Herald. At that time the TH rented quarters for its detached bureaus in their territories. George’s office was in a very small house formerly used by the Port Motel owners. In it were a typewriter and his camera gear, some office furniture and a Simplex page teleprinter.

That page teleprinter did print, but its main function was to send what George wrote straight to the TH newsroom, via a Western Union tieline, or dedicated phone line.

The Simplex page teleprinter was like the Simplex 2B I used, a year or two later, in the Western Union agency at Port Allegany Music Center, my store and teaching studio—except that the 2B printer printed on strips of gummed paper, fed from giant rolls. That printer and page teleprinters could activate their counterparts in distant newsrooms, causing bells to ring and signal lights to flash, and row upon row of text to appear as if by magic on long, continuous rolls of paper a foot wide or so. That’s why the Jimmy Stewart character in those movies would rush into a Western Union office and scribble on Western Union blanks at the counter,

But Linotypes were no longer in common use in 1964-5-6 when I was doing some campaigning for Senator Keating and for Goldwater-Miller, and for Nelson Rockefeller. A lot of that involved publicity. I wrote and sent out press releases, radio spots and mailings. It was important to cultivate contacts in the media. So I knew the Western New York editor, Francis Byron, and when they needed someone for the Allegany County slot he contacted me.

The Courier-Express had transitioned to computerized typesetting, the perforated tape generation of it. So had the Times Herald, which also recruited me before long.

Everything else, in news technology, seemed about where it had been for years. Cameras were still a lot like the ones I used to see Virginia Kallenborn and Alice Connolly use here in town, covering events for the TH and The Bradford Era, respectively.

In 1968 I used a camera with a folding bellows and a very fast shutter and a Honeywell 700 Strobonar. Later I used a Ricoh Singlex. Film was sent by a bus that made daily trips to Buffalo, or a delivery service that went to Olean or Wellsville.

Then the Courier-Express installed a Xerox Telecopier Transciever in my office, which was in my home. It was a forerunner to the fax, and akin to Telex. I typed up my stories on long foolscap and inserted the sheets in the machine, dialed the Buffalo number and pressed Send. A high definition send took six minutes, but on deadline I switched to four minutes. Covering a flood had me sending so continuously the machine started smoking, then died.

Soon I was sending copy to the Hornell Tribune by telecopier, too. But to “put something on the wire” I had to go to Wellsville and use the Daily Reporter’s AP set-up. Of course the Courier-Express also sent any of our material to AP when they thought it should have that audience.

After moving back to my hometown I was tracked down by Alpha Husted of the Times Herald, an amazing Pennsylvania bureau chief. So did a one-shot assignment, covering a coroner’s jury. But then I found myself doing regular coverage when the Pittsburgh Corning employees went to New York city to be checked for asbestos disease…

Working for the TH and The Era, I phoned copy to “dictation” at the papers, and sent film by the Caskeys. Then we became modern and used fax. Next we were using computers dialing up to and message boards.

Eventually we were using email and digital cameras and even transmitting photos as email attachments.

Thinking of the changes that took place in the Reporter Argus, technology-wise, I remember the change to photo-offset printing and how the quality of photographs changed so dramatically. Layout was still done by hand, with the paper being literally “waxed up” on page-size forms, then photographed.

When the paper was sold to a Coudersport family, layout still was done there. Sometimes I assisted. Copy preparation by us reporters, columnists and editors was done with computers, and the results were printed out. Macintoshes were used, so I got my Hackintosh going so they could use my disks, and so I could run JusText, Joey Majot’s favorite typesetting program.

Today layout is done electronically and the digital results transmitted to a distant printing company. The Era and the TH share a press room and crew.

Other changes traceable to communications technology relate to the shrinkage of the market for print publications generally, the ongoing drift of advertising from print to other media, and the rapid expansion of online news and social networks. Also, there is a shift to fluffier news and less serious reporting, even in some of the traditionally “serious” newspapers and news magazines, as well as radio and television.

But that’s news biz. Change.