Well, I tried, but I just don't like blogspot. And it won't do what I want it to do without a lot of thrashing around and figuring out ways to work around its limitations. So, I'm giving up on it and moving this blog to a Wordpress format. So, please click over there and follow me. There will be no more posts on this blog.
A visual and audio record of the men and women who worked in the newspaper world in the 1980s and before...before everything changed.
I started working as a newspaper photographer in 1968. The type was lead. The stories were typeset on Lineotype machines. The typewriters in the newsroom were manual with a roll of newsprint to type on. When the story was finished the reporter just ripped the paper off using the typewriter’s paper bail. The “modern” newsroom was a bunch of desks jammed together in the middle of the room. No cubicles, no partitions and certainly no private offices. It was a different world from newspapers today.
Today newspapers are dying. And so are the people who worked for them back when they were the main source of news. Those old newsrooms created a certain type of person. Those old newsrooms are gone now. Those editors with the green eye shades and garters on their shirt sleeves have all shuffled off. But a bunch of us are still around. And newspaper people are interesting people. And they have stories to tell.
This blog will show you those news people...the Ladies and Gentlemen of the Press...and let them tell you a little of their stories. Reporters, photographers, editors and also Lineotype operators, pressmen, engravers...anyone who worked putting out newspapers in the 1980s or earlier...back before the digital age changed everything.
I'm going to travel to meet those people and photograph them. And I'll take a recorder and ask each person I photograph to tell me some of their favorite stories from those days.
So, check back to meet these people and hear their stories. And if you are one of them...one of us...get in touch so I can come and hear your stories and take your photo for this blog. I hope you'll all participate as appropriate and help me find others who should participate. I hope when I finish that I'll have created something that you will all enjoy and that will pass along a little bit of who we were and what we did...and why it mattered in a world with no internet, no cell phones, no blogs, no CNN...
