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THOSE WERE THE DAYS: Linotype, afternoon deadlines & no Twitter
Jul 03, 2010
By PAUL MICKLE
Staff Writer
Today’s up-to-the-minute journalism reminds news veterans of the days of America’s afternoon newspapers, like Philadelphia’s Evening Bulletin, which put out four editions between noon and 6 p.m.
In the paper’s heyday in the 1950s and 1960s, stories in the first edition were updated with new information through the afternoon, just as articles today are continually revised in online versions of this and other newspapers.
The last press run came after the 4 p.m. closing of the stock market, and the Bulletin prided itself on getting the day’s stock closings into a final edition that would be distributed in time to be on dinner tables that evening.
In the days before the Internet, young people sometimes need to be reminded, readers had to rely on the printed word on paper. That required an army of reporters and typesetters to quickly revise stories with the tools and skills of the day — starting with hot lead.
My namesake father was a typesetter, or linotype operator, at the Bulletin for more than 30 years. On the occasion we kids saw him at work, he’d be sitting at a giant machine with a keyboard next to an ingot of lead melting into a vat of silvery, scalding liquid we were told not to touch.
Put on paper by old-fashioned typewriters, the news or advertising copy would be sent on air tubes from the reporters on the fourth floor to the composing room on the third — along with typeface and size instructions from editors and advertising reps.
The linotype machine would spit out the lines of type in reverse on metal “slugs’’ that were so hot they had to be wrapped in some paper before they could be carried over to the nearby compositor.
The compositor would put the slug into the correct position among the slugs already in place on a page “galley’’ that weighed hundreds of pounds and had to be read backwards.
The pages themselves and the inserts were printed out on a handpress and run over to proof readers to check. Today’s computers have spell check and even can help with grammar and usage, of course. But the Bulletin proof readers recognized context, when words spelled correct were mistakenly used and bad writing.
Putting out a newspaper in those days was more labor intensive than what is required of today’s journalist and the few compositors still working for newspapers, which have been produced photographically with “cold type’’ for decades now.
In Dad’s day, all the slugs of reverse type arranged correctly would be locked in place and the page would be rolled on a sturdy table on wheels to where workers would make from it a kind of plastic mold of the page called a plate.
The plates, which could be read, were sent to the basement press room, where they were used to make a metal version formed into a C so it would fit on the round rollers of the press.
Today, for better or worse, a reporter or editor can do the work of the typesetters, compositors, proof readers, plate makers and pressmen — and do it several times a day.
Like in the days of the evening newspaper, these days the reporter writes a few paragraphs for the online edition of the newspaper seconds after finding out the news. As more information comes out, online stories are updated.
And now the story also must be “tweeted,’’ a new verb meaning put up on a website newspapers use to attract readers to the paper’s cyber editions with the click of an icon.
In addition, because few expect newspapers to be printed on increasingly costly paper for many more years, reporters are being encouraged to put their stories on Facebook and other such websites, which could end up being key news conveyors in the near future.
Another new feature of the newspaper of the future is video in online editions. All reporters at The Trentonian, for instance, now carry around hand-held, high-defination cameras to make videos they must edit themselves before posting on line.
By the late 1960s, it was clear that linotype machines and hot type were soon going to be a thing of the past. The photographic systems that replaced the hot metal arrived just as the evening television news was taking people away from reading the afternoon paper at the dinner table.
These days, television news is losing viewers at the same rate newspapers were losing readers in the 1970s and 1980s. The Bulletin had a circulation of 761,000 in 1947, when it was the largest evening newspaper in the nation.
When it folded in 1982, three years after converting to a morning paper in response to the circulation decline caused by the evening television news, the Bulletin had a circulation of more than 400,000, which still has my Dad wondering how a paper with that many readers could go under.
The answer lies in the history of the written word: Gutenberg’s moveable type press in 1440 put thousands of so-called scribes out of work in Europe’s many religious monasteries, which produced most of the books of the day and received big money for them from those few who could afford to buy.
Gutenberg’s press and the improvements in it that followed made it so newspapers, by the early 1800s, could be produced on a mass scale and sold to the masses for a penny.
By the 1950s and 1960s, the new technology of television was taking readers away from evening newspapers and by the 1990s it was becoming clear that the Internet would make it possible to produce a newspaper without paper — or an army of workers using cumbersome and expensive technology.
It’s strictly hindsight, of course, but the answer to why The Bulletin went under is clear enough now, Dad: No newspaper can take the kind of circulation losses seen at the Bulletin back then and at the newspapers of today going under because more people than ever are turning to new technologies to get the news.
Today, the challenge for people in the news business is recognizing which new technology will catch on and make its competitors go the way of the eight-track audio tape.
Paul Mickle, city editor of The Trentonian, worked as a messenger and production clerk for the Philadelphia Bulletin as a teenager and college student.
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