Our Voice
It’s a wonderful time to be a journalist.
See, back in the old days, putting together a newspaper took a heck of a lot more work than it does now. Don’t get us wrong – we are in the office for more than 14 hours on Wednesday nights putting The Colonnade together – but compared to what the journalists of yesteryears had to do, we have it just plain easy.
In the old days, we would be writing stories on typewriters instead of our PCs and Macs. We would then have to retype the entire thing if there was anything wrong, and there was no spell check to save us from our own stupidity and oversights.
Photographs had to be taken and developed. In this digital age, we can look at them as we take them and know if we have some keepers, and can use programs to crop them and improve their quality as needed in mere minutes.
Papers were physically laid out by putting cut pieces of paper on a board, using a weird kind of ruler called a pica pole (a pica is a small unit of measurement used in layout and design and almost nowhere else) to make sure everything was spaced correctly. Photos had to be physically cut to fit in the spaces allocated for them. These days we use a handy design program that lets us do all that without ever touching a pair of scissors or getting ink on our fingers.
In the old days, papers were published by getting big, waxy templates called plates made of the assembled product by running them through a sort of press so complicated that we don’t really want to try to explain it. Once again, all this is now done by machines at our publisher, with humans only having to look it over for quality control and to line it up correctly in the machines that now print 1,500 copies of our paper in less than 20 minutes.
In the past if there was breaking news it might be held if the process was too far along there was no time to make the changes and start from the ground up. Now it is much less of a hassle, meaning that we can bring our readers the latest news – so long as it happens before Wednesday night/Thursday morning and we put the paper to bed.
If our readers wanted to get in touch with us in the past, they had to sit down and write a physical letter and mail it the newspaper office. Now we’re just an e-mail away.
Some readers in the past would miss the paper if they were out of town or if the papers were all gone from the racks by the time they went to get a copy. Now the entire paper is online on our Web site, with sections at the end of every article for readers to leave comments about what they read. Once again, contacting the paper and voicing your opinion has never been easier.
All this marvelous change in the newspaper world makes it infinitely easier for us to do our jobs for you. On the flip side of that same coin, it makes it easier for you to read and reach us.
It’s a wonderful time to be a journalist.
Posted by Colonnade Archives
on Feb 15 2008. Filed under Opinion, Our Voice.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0.
You can leave a response or trackback to this entry
