This past weekend’s widespread Internet outage prompted memories of when I first began to work on these newfangled devises called computers.
Yes, young folks, we oldsters in the journalism business used to type or even write our stories in cursive and have some typesetter then handle our copy before we went to press. For me, my jarring first encounter with the future occurred in September 1976, when I arrived as the new sports editor of the six days a week daily newspaper, the Albion Evening Recorder.
The entire newsroom was directed to type all copy on a video display terminal that was connected by a CompuEdit system. Today, that arrangement would be regarded as almost as much a dinosaur as a typewriter.
But in 1976, it was radical stuff, a good example of progressivism in the workplace.
Of course, I had to make adjustments to the system, but so did everybody else.
When I came to Albion, I succeeded a local institution in George V. Mather, who had been editor of the publication for more than 35 years. He graduated from Albion High School and then Albion College. You might say he was a lifer.
Mather decided to retire in ’76 and his successor was another lifer, David G. Moore, who was a lot younger and very progressive in his outlook for journalism. It was Moore who agreed to become editor if the publisher, Blair Bedient, would implement a computer system.
I did spend some time at weekly high school adult education sessions learning to type, but learned I was better off just doing the hunt and peck because for me it was faster.
My first several months at Albion were engulfed by learning to use a computer, and after a brief trial by fire, I came to enjoy the newfangled machines, which could do so much more. Furthermore, I was blessed with an editor who didn’t like sports and pretty much left me alone to decide how to cover four high schools and a college.
However, there were a couple of instances in which old-school George V. Mather earned some short-term revenge. Mather still would hang around the newspaper office and do a few assignments and act as a sort of local historian.
When the computer system would crash, it would cause newsroom personnel to become suddenly inactive, with no way to continue to compose or edit stories. It was then that Mather would cackle and work on his typewriter and gleefully exclaim that he still was able to keep working.
He also picked up some revenge whenever there was a power outage that shut down the machines.
By the time I was promoted to editor in 1979, there was no discussion at all about going back to the old ways. Other functions at the newspaper were being taken up by machines, and in 1981 we launched a satellite system that would enable our sister newspaper, the Marshall Evening Chronicle, to pick up the United Press International news wire.
The old guy gained a lot of personal satisfaction when the old ways trumped the newfangled artificial ways. But his satisfaction was short lived.
And when I left in 1984, the Albion Recorder was seriously think about switching to a MacIntosh computer system with a laser printer. George Mather was becoming more and more obsolete.
I left Albion to take a much better paying job at a huge weekly newspaper chain in Oakland County, but The Spinal Column still did composition and editing old school by typewriters. I only lasted a year, swearing that I would never “Make Newspapering Great Again” by restoring the old ways.
Yet when this widespread Internet outage visited this area Saturday evening and into Sunday morning, I revisited the horror of just how dependent we are on this system, and how powerless we are to fix it when serious issues rear their ugly heads.
Yet going back to the typewriter would be like abandoning the automobile and returning to the horse and buggy. In that way, you certainly call me progressive.