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From the Editor's Desk
It was not quite nine years ago when I started my career in newspapers. The folks at my first paper still designed pages in a somewhat old-fashioned way. The pages you see all have to be made somehow, and someone has to decide how to fit all those advertisements and stories together in the space given. Back then, we did use computers, but they were pretty limited in what they could do. We wrote our stories on them, and someone at some time had the created page number strips you see at the top of every newspaper. We'd print out the stories in long columns and take scissors to cut those long strips of copy away from the paper, then run them through a machine that coated one side with hot wax. We'd stick those little strips of paper onto a larger sheet, the actual size of a page in the paper. We'd cut and position to arrange things in a way that would hopefully make sense and look good. If you wanted a picture and its caption to stand alone on the page, you'd whip out a role of border tape, a thin, clear tape with a thinner black line running down the middle. We'd lay down the border tape and trim the ends with a razor. On production days, everyone in the office would gather together in the composing rooms standing in front of high, tilted tables, with every page in the paper laid out in a line. People would be pasting up page numbers, applying border tape, arranging the stories and headlines, and proofreading, marking mistakes with little blue pens. There was a palpable sense of teamwork and camaraderie to be felt in those days. Sometimes it would be stressful and tense, others would feel like a little party with people joking and having a good time while putting the paper together. There may even be a couple of throw-back papers that still do it much the same way today. I imagine they're probably run by some cranky old men who smoke like chimneys, curse like sailors and keep a bottle stashed in the desk for the end of the day. But the rest of us are fully computerized, digitized, hard drived and alphabetized. The layout tables have been replaced with flat screen lcd monitors. The hustle and bustle of the composing room has given way to the quiet buzz of a hard drive, a cooling fan and a laser printer that springs to life now and then. It's much quieter in the newsroom now, our faces bathed in the glow of Quark Xpress and Photoshop, occasionally calling out to one another about which page we're on or where to put the extra stories. On a good day, I can put pages together faster than my first editor did, and he was a whiz with a pair of 10 inch sheers. Speedwize, I'm probably and average designer on the computer. We can do more with fewer people. We can make sure things line up with computerized precision. Those boxes around our photos have perfect corners every time. We can do things that were nearly impossible with the old ways.
But there are times when I still get nostalgic for those days.
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