back

by ilamont·2d ago·view on hn ↗
> I realized somewhere in the middle of the caffeine and sugar rush, just what a huge effort it takes to put out a DAILY newspaper. It's incredible, even without considering the cheap price.

Former newspaper editor here. We took it for granted at the time, but the orchestration of different teams on a daily basis, with all kinds of cascading workflows and triggers, was something to behold. Editorial, design, special sections, ads, production, printing ... plus all of the smaller teams (copy desk, sports, etc.) and ad-hoc collaborations for instance involving a special event or major news story.

You'd go home late (or more often than not in those days, to the bar) feeling good about what your team had just shipped and looking forward to getting the hard copy early the next morning (sometimes when leaving said bar!). And then you'd start all over again around 11 am. It was far more intense than magazine or book publishing, which I got into later.

And this was in the 90s. Technology was making things faster, but there were still a lot of older analog systems in place including photography darkrooms. Once I even had to call in a breaking late story over a pay phone, dictating it to the editor on duty. Laptops were rare and expensive, and even the people who used them typically saved to a floppy which would be brought in to the newsroom later to be edited.

We had primitive terminal-based word processors (we called it "CText" but I can't locate any reference to it now) and I got started just as Quark Xpress entered the design workflow, replacing xacto knives and bits of paper and opaque plastic that was somehow imaged and sent to the printers. If you went back 30 years earlier, they were still using linotype.

2 comments
This came up recently on HN, I thought it was an amazing watch: https://www.nytimes.com/video/insider/100000004687429/farewe...

I couldn't imagine the stress to hit deadline. And the insanity of making a whole set of new metal rollers every single day. It all really drove home just how much work went into making the paper happen.

Interesting that nearly every single operator in that video is a middle-aged or older guy. Possibly because it was a union and those jobs were rock steady for decades, with very low turnover.

There are linotype machines in museums, and sometimes they fire them up for demonstrations. There are very few printers left who actually know how to use them, the operator I saw was 90 years old!

My first real job out of college was IT at a college textbook publishing company in the early-2000s. I had some experience doing design for offset printing in college, and I was kind of a hacker (with a philosophy degree), so that's probably why they hired me. My job was to help the design and production people switch to QuarkXPress and related tools. Many of these people were NOT HAPPY, let me tell you. They felt like the desktop publishing was taking the art out of the book design process. Now that technology has come for even people in my camp (software engineers and computer scientists), and I am 20+ years older, it's hard not to feel for what they were going through.

Ultimately, the company "did fine" but "doing fine" mostly meant that the older folks retired sooner than they had planned and were replaced with younger people who were more eager to cut their teeth doing design on a computer.