Coda
Even the old news dogs are learning new tricks
Greg Bean

My first month in the news business, I fell into the middle of a technical revolution that was making the old news hounds miserable.

That month, the publisher (a squinty-eyed fellow with a heart the size of a pea) decided to throw out the last of the ancient manual typewriters that created a cacophony of brain-searing clacking in the newsroom and require everyone who still needed a typewriter to use IBM Selectrics - the kind with those little balls you could change if you wanted to switch typefaces.

They were great typewriters, but the old-time reporters and editors in the newsroom were against change as a matter of principle. Those were the days when editors still swore at reporters who turned in substandard work, when everyone smoked at their desk and when most people kept a bottle of strong spirits in the bottom drawer - we called them Lou Grant Kits, in honor of the newspaper editor in a popular television show at the time. In those days, we got wire service feeds over the phone lines, but the old wire machine that spewed miles and miles of coded tape was still around in case of emergency. Until very recently, lead type had been set in galleys by the grumpy union guys in the back shop and, no kidding, the chief photographer still often used a camera that required flash bulbs.

When the last edition was finally put to bed around midnight, the bottles would come out, newsmen and women would put their feet up on their desks, some of the men would light cigars and everyone would spend an hour or so solving the remaining problems of the world.

Later that same year, I filed a story I'd written for Time magazine at the local Western Union telegraph office. We considered Time magazine's copy transmission system "backward."

It was a good life in the Dark Ages, and with the exception of those IBM typewriters, most of us figured the business would go on pretty much the way it was for the rest of our lifetimes. Change had come slowly to our profession in the 538 years since Johannes Gutenberg invented the first press with movable type, after all, and while we expected the basic technology to improve gradually, none of us could conceive of the sea change that would shortly rock our worlds.

The next year, the publisher yanked the IBM Selectrics, and after that, all of our written work, even letters, were typed on quiet keyboards and read at huge green monitors on our desks. Stories and headlines came out on long strips of paper that had to be cut and "pasted up." The computer that handled this basic word processing was the size of a bus and was always breaking down. We hated it, and several of the old news hands retired rather than deal with it. The newsroom was awash in grumbling and there were incidents of outright insurrection. The society editor was so upset she started to hyperventilate one day and spent the best part of an hour breathing into a paper bag. A guy named Bob actually threw his shoe at the monitor on his desk and broke it.

To combat the newsroom malaise, the publisher brought in an "expert" to prepare us for a rapidly evolving future, to encourage us to "adapt" and get us excited about the great leaps in technology that would soon make our lives better.

"Someday," the expert said, "you'll be able to read an entire newspaper page on your computer screen. As a matter of fact, you'll be able to read the whole paper there if you want."

We all laughed. What an idiot! We figured the guy had fried his brain watching too many episodes of the "Jetsons." Who'd ever want to read news on their computer? Nobody, that's who.

Man, were we ever wrong! In the nearly 30 years since that day, more change has come to the newspaper business than had come in all the years since Gutenberg fired up his first press in 1440.

Computers evolved at a mind-boggling rate. The 'puter I'm writing on now is 100 times more powerful than that first newspaper computer that served the whole company and was the size of a whale. The paste-up tables are gone, because we produce pages on-screen. Cameras are digital, no more film. We send our finished pages to the press via cable. Soon, we'll be able to send those pages directly from our terminals to a plate on the printing press.

The Internet, perhaps the greatest revolution of all, has not only given us the ability to communicate with the whole world immediately, it has put a research tool at our disposal so extensive and instantaneous it was completely unimaginable a decade ago.

And the hits just keep on coming.

While newspapers began putting their content on the Web several years ago, publications like this one across the world are in a race to develop cutting-edge, interactive Web presences to complement their print products. No longer just text regurgitations of their newspapers, these Web sites are a virtual cornucopia of media choices. Blogs and discussion groups. Podcasts. Video logs. Mashups. Flash animation. Interactive maps and graphics. Stories on video. Narrated slide shows. Individual community "micro-sites" with ultra-local news and information, as well as links to hundreds of other community organizations, businesses, classifieds and retail outlets.

The sites are becoming one-stop destinations for information about the towns we live in, electronic community centers where the choices about how we receive information and what kind of information we receive are nearly endless.

At Greater Media Newspapers, we've been working for most of the last year to develop our own version of that community center, and we're beginning to roll out some of the elements of our effort.

These days, reporters are using video cameras, and several of their reports are already available on our Web site, www.gmnews.com. We're making a greater effort to put breaking news on that site as it happens. We're learning, experimenting, developing.

And the best is yet to come. Soon, all of the choices I talked about earlier will be available at our site, and more. We're looking forward to unveiling those changes, and we'll let you know about them as we go along. It's a brave new world out there, folks, and it will be fun to face it together.

I suspect even old shoe-throwing Bob would be excited by the possibilities.

Gregory Bean is executive editor of Greater Media Newspapers. You can reach him at gbean@gmnews.com.