Lela Davis sat at her computer terminal in the air-conditioned newsroom where she paginates pages. She took a break between mouse clicks to answer questions about the way things were before gadgets, gizmos and electronic wizardry forever changed the inner workings of newspapers.Davis started working at The Anniston Star in 1953, when type was formed of hot lead that workers poured from smelting pots. It was labor intensive, tiring work, made extinct by a series of technological breakthroughs — ad-vancements that killed some departments and birthed others.
One of the departments that followed the way of the dinosaur was the composing room, where Davis first started. Back then, she got a 15-minute break, 30 minutes for lunch, and “The rest of the time you were sitting there pound-ing and punching tape.”
Every word of copy was manually typed on machines that punched coded symbols of letters onto a string of tape.
At today’s Anniston Star, computer pagination has replaced the composing room. The job of composing is done by keyboard strokes and mouse clicks from the comfort of swivel chairs.
“It’s just awesome to think about where we were then and what things have gotten to now,” Davis said. “This is much easier.”
Ken Shropshire and Charlie Hess also worked in the composing room. Shropshire now paginates for the advertising department. Hess has become a computer associate technician.
Shropshire was building an ad on his computer while talking to a customer on the phone. Computers allow for in-stant changes. Much of the work, though, was still done by hand until the mid-1990s. Before then, he was pasting pages together. The tools of his trade were wax, an X-acto knife and steady hands.
“Pagination basically did away with the composing room altogether,” Shropshire said.
Hess monitors the pulse of The Star from a climate-controlled room that is the heart of all information flow: the computer room. The first computer arrived in 1970. “I’ve been working with computers ever since,” he said.
The Star got its first mainframe computer in 1980. It had nine terminals and little storage space. Hess said today’s average personal computer has 800 times more storage space than The Star’s first mainframe.
“We’ve had so many changes in the last 10 years that it’s hard to keep up with them,” said Hess, who is one of six technicians in the computer department — a department that wasn’t around in 1990.
Another new feature of today’s Star is the online division.
The paper launched its earliest attempt at a Web site in 1996. It lasted only a few days. The software was slow. It took eight hours to upload the day’s news and was difficult for readers to navigate, which quickly led to its demise.
Aided by a faster Internet connection, The Star again voyaged into cyberspace on Labor Day of 1998. This time it took, and by 2000 the online division was born, conceived by a commitment to provide information “in ways that our readers want it,” said Online Director Geni Certain.
Before the fee system was introduced in August 2002, an average of 8,000 computer users logged onto The Star’s Web site each day. Online subscribers number nearly 2,000 after two months in the fee system.
“The Internet has given readers a lot more choices about their sources for news,” Certain said. But she added that it also has diluted the credibility of information because so many sources do not employ journalistic standards of truth, accuracy and fairness. “People have to be a lot more careful about what they read on the Internet.”
The Star Online engages readers in dialogue through focus groups and roundtable discussions. Certain said, “One of the positive things about the Internet is it has fostered that kind of community through the online message board.”
A challenge now facing the online division is how to deliver services to wireless customers, Certain said. It’s a di-lemma she couldn’t have imagined when coverage of the 1968 Democrat and Republican conventions inspired her to enter journalism.
“I’ve always been such a fan of science fiction, and this seems like I’m living in some futuristic world that I could only read about as a teen-ager,” Certain said.
As a tool for information, the Internet has revolutionized the newsroom.
“It makes good reporters better and lazy reporters as lazy as all get out,” said Assistant Features Editer Laura Tutor. “You can’t use that resource as a substitute for talking to real people.”
When the newsroom first got access to the Internet, Tutor feared it would depersonalize the information-gathering process. “Your product is only as good as your contact with people,” she said.
Technology and the change from an afternoon to a morning paper has contributed to reporters being less aware of the production side of newspapers, Tutor added.
On the production side, the old Goss Press Urbanite press that faithfully had printed The Star since 1970 is gone, replaced by a 10-foot-by-157-foot suped up Dolphin Graphics Machinery model. “It’s brand spankin’ new,” pro-duction manager Roger Sawyer said of the new press.
The switch happened when the paper moved from 10th Street to its current address at McClellan Boulevard.
Besides being double the size of the old six-unit model and offering several new features, Sawyer said, the new press can print newspapers at a top speed of 28,000 in less than an hour (45 minutes to be exact). It took two and a half to three hours to do the same with the old press, he said.
Almost everything about the new press is automated, controlled from a computer room that resembles a control panel at some nuclear power plant.
Other than the building, the press is the most expensive item at the paper — costing a whopping $3.9 million. And it isn’t state-of-the-art, Sawyer said. The upscale, high-end models are out of reach for hometown papers, he added.
Photography has seen a lot of changes because of new technology, most of which has occurred in the last three years as The Star became one of the first papers in the state to go all digital.
Digital brought creatures of the darkroom into the light of the newsroom. “We use to be hideouts,” said photogra-pher Bill Wilson. “We were seldom seen.”
Photographers were spending much of their time processing rolls of film in rooms that stank of chemicals. Digital made film extinct. A darkroom wasn’t even included in the new building’s design.
Pictures that once took 30 or more minutes to develop now are transferred from camera to computer in seconds.
“What I like best about it is you can see the image on the camera … and tweak the picture in the field,” said chief photographer Trent Penny.
In the old days, photographers lugged a 75-pound transmitter along to relay pictures back to the newsroom. Today they can do it by e-mail via the Internet from a laptop computer.
Using film, photographers would have to leave college night games at halftime to get the shot in on time for that night’s press deadline. “Now you can stay the whole game,” Penny said. “It doesn’t matter what time the game starts.”
Digital cameras bought just three years ago already are outdated though. New ones take clearer pictures faster and enable the user to transmit them wirelessly using cell phones. Future cameras will relay the image directly from the camera to a computer in the newsroom, Penny said.
Because of technological advances, the copy desk — where stories are edited and paginated — can redo a front page in 10 minutes.
Before pagination, it took several hours.
“It (pagination) has made the composing room obsolete and put those jobs on the copy desk,” said news editor Phillip Tutor.
Design has become a more important feature of the job, he said, adding that papers are becoming more flashy to catch the eyes of younger readers.
“It’s becoming more of a technical job, a computer job, an artistic job, in some places, than a job of words,” he said. “The big challenge for the copy desk and editors is to ensure that we don’t lose sight of why we are doing this.”
New advancements, no doubt, will change the face of newspapers even more. Tutor said newspapers in Europe, and to some degree in the Unites States, are using PDF — portable document format — so customers can print a paper from their home printer — eliminating the press and delivery.
“It’s changing so fast,” he said, “that to a great degree, I don’t know if I can tell you where we will be in 20 years.”
