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It's so nice to have young people around the Cafe. Us
weathered vetrans of countless newspapers - and special sections - get
to tell Nick and Zeke about how it was in the old days and watch their
eyes widen in amazement.
"You're kidding," Nick said when I told him how I had to take
a photograph to Atlanta and wait two days to get the negatives back
in order to publish The Herald's first full-color front page picture
13 years ago.
That's because you can't reproduce a color photograph without creating
four pieces of film, one each for the black, blue, red and yellow "plates"
that add ink to our pages as they travel through a press that occupies
roughly the area of half a basketball court. Each color has to be "separated"
onto its own plate. By mixing the blue, yellow, red and black in varying
amounts, all the subtle shades that make up a single photograph are
created. Back then there wasn't a computer in Western North Carolina
that could perform those separations.
Once The Franklin Press invested in the proper technology (around 1994),
we ran more color. When we got our first modern computer and learned
to do the separations here at The Herald office (circa 1996), we made
color photos a staple of every front page.
Nowadays, the "type" we prepare for our pages comes out of
a laser printer and looks quite similar to the output from any computer.
Before 1997, however, we had "photo-typesetters," which sent
the letters we typed to film that had to be developed much as a roll
of Kodak shot in your old-fashioned (non-digital) camera.
Those particular machines, the ones that preceded our current crop of
Macintosh computers, seemed quite advanced in that they could store
the information fed into them on floppy disks. Before about 1980, such
typesetting equipment could only remember (store) one or two lines,
and if the processor (developer) "ate" your story, you had
to write it again. Sometimes more than once.
And when I talked about the newspaper production during my college days,
when I "typeset" information on a machine that punched holes
in ticker tape, Zeke voiced her own doubts.
"Why did it do that?" she wanted to know.
I felt like an old granny-woman as I explained that back in those really
olden days (the early 1970s), that was all the equipment we had. We
were, in fact, amazed that when we fed our very long, pinkish-colored,
punched-full-of-holes strips of paper through another handy-dandy gadget,
it could decipher the pattern of holes and print the story out perfectly
in one colum (about 2 inches wide) rows.
Frosty, who's been at this newspaper stuff even longer, can recollect
all the way back to when all the "type" had to be set by hand
into lead slugs that were then fitted into a steel chase - one for each
page. A typical front page weighed in at around 110 pounds.
All this is by way of prefacing the fact that it's Wednesday morning,
and I'm scared to death.
We just cast the front page of this week's edition off into cyberspace,
and we're hoping that the computers at the Mountain Press in Franklin
will reel in our stories and pictures and somehow put them where they're
supposed to be.
We've had a few (mostly successful) practice runs in black and white,
but this is the Front Page for heaven's sakes. I'm a bundle of nerves,
and I will be until we see the finished product and know that the commissioners
and other dignitaries in the Department of Social Services groundbreaking
photo look like themselves, and that all the information we all worked
so hard to find and prepare is available for our readers.
We've been taking small steps to prepare for several months now, ever
since we learned all the papers printed at Franklin's Mountain Press
were switching to electronic file transfer and were told we'd better
get on board or be left in the dust.
And we've learned a new word, "pagination," which means that
all the parts of a standard newspaper page - ads, stories and photos
- are fit together on our computer screens instead of with scissors
and wax as we've done for 30-odd years.
Like any voyage, this latest expedition is both exhilarating and terrifying.
It's hard to let go of the pages we can see and feel in favor of the
ones that stare back at us from our monitors.
Our gurus in Franklin speak of pagination as if it's akin to the Holy
Grail of Journalism. We've been promised better quality, more dazzling
color and a more pleasing overall publication.The downside they don't
mention is the loss of opportunity for lots of eyes to proofread and
find mistakes before they're printed.
So here's hoping for the desired result. We gave it our best shot, and
we're semi-confident that it will work out.
If part of a story is missing, or if the colors in the photos are a
little odd, you have our apologies in advance.
We threw caution to the wind and took a giant step toward the future.
It's Wednesday morning, and I'm still a nervous wreck.
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