The technology is-a-changin’
Come gather ‘round journalists
BY BECKY OSTERWALD
MANAGING EDITOR
When Johannes Gutenberg invented the moveable printing press in 1439, little did he know what changes would take place almost six centuries later. Until the 18th century, newspapers were the major source of news—followed by radio and television in the 20th century and most recently, the internet.
Since I started my career 30 years ago, journalism has gone from an old IBM Selectric typewriter to a clunky “compugraphic” that printed copy on photographic paper to electronic devices. In 1989, I switched my small community newspaper to a computer with small six-inch black and white screen.
My brother Carl was the computer geek in the family and he brought the machine down. As he was teaching me to use my new Apple SE30, I asked him if 64 megabytes would be enough memory. His response, “You’ll never use that much [memory].” Needless to say, that statement has come back to haunt him.
Now we have computers and phones all-in-one that fit in the palm of your hand and storage in the terabytes located in “the cloud.” File sharing has never been easier. Last year after my knee surgery, I spent three weeks working from home and via the internet, Dropbox and email.
Gone are the hours it took to take strips of copy (using either hot lead or strips of photo paper), screen the photographs so they could be printed using a dot pattern, run them through an old hot-wax machine, paste onto a layout page, tape the pages together and finally drive to the printer with “camera-ready copy.”
In its place is “what you see is what you get” layout downloaded to the printer in a matter of seconds. Out are the days when the weekly newspaper was the final source of information for communities. In our 24/7 news channels and blogs on the information superhighway, which aren’t always that accurate.
The changes to the newspaper, as well as all industries, have been enormous and the changes will continue. The question is, and always will be, how does the industry change and adapt to technology?
I sold my newspaper, the Eastern Colorado Plainsman in Lincoln County before the massive influx of social media. But I always believed—and still do—that community newspapers are a vital source of information. Where else could the readers of The Villager have seen first the OSIRIS-REx satellite BEFORE the local television news hounds picked up on it?
Now newspapers use the internet and social media to expand their audience to a digital age of millennial readers who were practically born knowing how to use computers.
What will never change are the need for advertising representatives to bring in the revenue stream, the accounting department to bill the clients, the editorial staff to fill up the pages, the production staff to put it all together, the publisher to hold the whole thing together, and the printer to print the newspaper. But most important are the loyal readers.
When my mother started her publishing company, Western Guideways, Ltd. in 1965, she never imagined that technology would force her small company to adapt to the massive changes in technology and turn her books into apps for smartphones because the printer has retired.
It blows me away thinking about all those hours the family spent hauling boxes of books to Durango and Silverton and then to Chama N.M. and Antonito, Colo., much less to Canon City and Leadville.
Still, journalism, and in my mom’s case, historical research, is still the art of collecting facts and putting them in a form that (as my dad used to say) “the shoe clerk from Jersey can understand.”
Even though the informational superhighway is fast and instantaneous, that isn’t always the best because the facts can get left behind. Reporters need to continue to do the legwork to get the facts accurate and that is something that technology can’t and won’t change.
