Last time you buyed a print newspaper

[ErmineNotyours]

Every day on the way to work I drive past the remaining Seattle Times truck fleet.  They used to have their own press in Bothell, but they demolished that with the presses still in place, and now they contract it out to a third party press in Kent.  The trucks still have the Times and PI names on them, and the new trucks on the left are still unpainted.  Their plans to open a second plant in Renton died when the price of newsprint went up.  Those were the days.

[hbelkins]

The fall of the news industry has been hard for me, as someone who grew up reading newspapers and majored in journalism in college and worked in the field for many years, to believe. The newspaper industry has been its own worst enemy, though, and has brought the waning circulation numbers and scorn it receives upon itself.

When started delivering papers for a short period of time, I was filling out some paperwork and talked about how they had an online paper, which was pretty novel for the time, but they felt it had to be "free" because this way they'd be out front of any competition. Besides, there really wasn't a online subscription service that they could work out back in 1997, and they only had one webmaster who typed up everything (it wasn't the entire paper, just the equivalent of the first few pages of each section). There weren't even any ads, which were still kind of a new-ish thing at the time.

I really look back at that question as a pivotal point, since the answer was seen as damned-if-you-do and damned-if-you-don't for the intersection of technologies in that time.

When I got started in the business, layout was done manually. There was actually one newspaper left in Kentucky that used hot-metal Linotype machines; everyone else used phototypesetting. You still had to manually cut out the copy and paste it on a layout sheet using hot wax. In 1987, I took a job with a paper that was one of the first adopters of desktop publishing in Kentucky. They used Macintosh computers to produce the copy using a laser printer and plain paper, but it still had to be pasted up. Computerized pagination wasn't a thing yet and could only be done on a rudimentary basis within the limits of Aldus Pagemaker. (Yes, I said Aldus, not Adobe.)

I left the business for six years, and when I went back, in 2001, full pagination was catching on. You could produce full pages on the computer, produce PDF files, and transmit those electronically to the printing plant. You didn't have to transport full-page paste-ups to the plant to have negatives shot and printing plates prepared.

The advent of that technology made it easier to produce electronic editions of that day's paper. While many newspapers have Web sites that show news stories, and they may or may not be paywalled, you can subscribe to an e-edition that contains PDF files of what was printed that day. Papers may offer this service via a Web site or by emailing you the PDF.

[1995hoo]

^^^^

Did someone then have to use a roller to "roll the pages" before sending them to the print shop? What you're describing sounds very similar to how we published The Cavalier Daily during my college years. (But we ran PageMaker on PCs, not on Macs.)

[formulanone]

The fall of the news industry has been hard for me, as someone who grew up reading newspapers and majored in journalism in college and worked in the field for many years, to believe. The newspaper industry has been its own worst enemy, though, and has brought the waning circulation numbers and scorn it receives upon itself.

When started delivering papers for a short period of time, I was filling out some paperwork and talked about how they had an online paper, which was pretty novel for the time, but they felt it had to be "free" because this way they'd be out front of any competition. Besides, there really wasn't a online subscription service that they could work out back in 1997, and they only had one webmaster who typed up everything (it wasn't the entire paper, just the equivalent of the first few pages of each section). There weren't even any ads, which were still kind of a new-ish thing at the time.

I really look back at that question as a pivotal point, since the answer was seen as damned-if-you-do and damned-if-you-don't for the intersection of technologies in that time.

When I got started in the business, layout was done manually. There was actually one newspaper left in Kentucky that used hot-metal Linotype machines; everyone else used phototypesetting. You still had to manually cut out the copy and paste it on a layout sheet using hot wax. In 1987, I took a job with a paper that was one of the first adopters of desktop publishing in Kentucky. They used Macintosh computers to produce the copy using a laser printer and plain paper, but it still had to be pasted up. Computerized pagination wasn't a thing yet and could only be done on a rudimentary basis within the limits of Aldus Pagemaker. (Yes, I said Aldus, not Adobe.)

I left the business for six years, and when I went back, in 2001, full pagination was catching on. You could produce full pages on the computer, produce PDF files, and transmit those electronically to the printing plant. You didn't have to transport full-page paste-ups to the plant to have negatives shot and printing plates prepared.

The advent of that technology made it easier to produce electronic editions of that day's paper. While many newspapers have Web sites that show news stories, and they may or may not be paywalled, you can subscribe to an e-edition that contains PDF files of what was printed that day. Papers may offer this service via a Web site or by emailing you the PDF.

I took a printing class in high school, mainly because it was the only way I was going to take a photography class, but we used a combination of a laser printer and Macintosh and later, Aldus Pagemaker (though I think I used it exactly once, someone else was a wiz at that). We still had to do layouts the old fashioned way, and photomechanical transfer for any images. Then set it all up on an offset press.

It's been 30+ years since I've worked with those things together but it was neat to get a glimpse of the physical backend production work. I think it bugged my family that a potential college student liked getting hands dirty but we didn't have auto shop, being a fairly new school. I enjoyed seeing and doing hands-on with making stuff.

I highly doubt that massive industrial paper cutter is used by students today. Watching that three-foot wide blade cut through 1000 sheets of paper at an arcing angle was so very satisfying.

HB, the electronic text from print back to online makes more sense than I envisioned; it didn't seem to be possible to type that all up, even given that HTML was pretty basic back then. I figured someone was hammering it all up at 120wpm...

[hbelkins]

^^^^

Did someone then have to use a roller to "roll the pages" before sending them to the print shop? What you're describing sounds very similar to how we published The Cavalier Daily during my college years. (But we ran PageMaker on PCs, not on Macs.)

Yes. I think the technical term was "burnisher" but "roller" was the term that was in common use.

I recently found an old proportion wheel, but my pica pole remains missing. I also found some rolls of border tape that had been stashed away from the 1980s.

I didn't have my own roller, but I stealthily guarded my proportion wheel, pica pole, scissors, and Xacto knife.