Look, I like using computers, but there was so much art involved in the old way of making a newspaper. I remember some of it, from my days at The Quill, student newspaper at Brandon University (since 1910!), and I was especially fond of the waxer, which we used to decorate our office door with cutouts and magazine pages.
But by the time I got there, we had already moved away from typewriters and typesetters, so I never got to see that part of the process.
Luckily, another student newspaper, The Daily Titan, has a history page up, documenting the start-to-finish production method they used in the 1970s. There are three pages, starting from story generation, through page layout and finally printing the physical product.
There is a main history page, too, which documents some of the world these journalists were living in.
I’m moved by the obvious fondness that so many people have for an idealized world of journalism (see also: State of Play and Superman) but the fact that there’s so much nostalgia I think means most people have long since given it up for lost.
(hat tip to Steve Juras, who is quickly becoming a go-to guy for cool links, and has he noticed that Absurd Intellectual still needs a logo?
Anyway, found this through his Twitter feed, as alluded to below.)
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Stacey
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MPot

