100 Years Of Technology News
A clipping from the Newspaper Association of America’s magazine — these pages are from TechNews, “the NAA magazine of newspaper operations,” November/December 1999. The feature is a century-end retrospective assembled by editor Clark Robinson from the association’s own publications: the ANPA Bulletin (1900), the ANPA Mechanical Bulletin (1927), the ANPA Research Institute Bulletin (1959), Presstime (1979), ANPA tech news (1990) and TechNews (1995). All of it archived, the article notes, in NAA’s Information Resource Center — “an unbroken chain of technology news and information covering the past 100 years.”
The organizing idea is that the tools change and the problems don’t. Robinson opens with Richard E. Lewis, then manager of ANPA’s Mechanical Department, speaking to production executives in Atlantic City on June 22, 1958, after reading the transcript of the first Mechanical Conference in Harrisburg, Pa.:
“I noted the problems that these 87 gentlemen in Harrisburg were facing then are pretty much the same problems we are facing today.”
And then makes the same point about his own moment:
Forty-two years have passed since Lewis’ speech and 72 since that first Mechanical Conference. And believe it or not, we are still facing the same problems: improving the printed quality of newspapers; reducing costs, and reducing the time a story takes to get from editor to reader. These are the same issues, in fact, that our predecessors faced in 1900. They are timeless.
The excerpts run from typewriter discounts and newsprint waste percentages in 1900, through Linotype maintenance complaints in 1910, offset presses in 1940, the Fotosetter and the Sheridan stuffer in 1950, to the ANPA Research Institute Bulletin’s 1970 “newsroom of the future” — reporters at CRT consoles, editors with light pens, “a group of editing consoles will take the place of the copy desk.” A 1979 bulletin from Harris Corp.’s Dr. Joseph E. Rowe describes, quite accurately, digital cameras and Photoshop. My favorite is Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, in a 1979 ANPA Research Institute Bulletin, on the terminal in his office:
“At first, I inadvertently caused a problem by signing my notes with my nickname ‘Punch.’ Apparently, that word triggered the system downstairs to spew out paper tape—no one could figure out who wanted all that tape!”
The issue closes with a TechNews fax poll of production executives on their top three priorities for the first 100 days of the new millennium. Nearly every answer begins with Y2K. The best of them, from Kelly Perine, production systems manager at The Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch:
1. Y2K
2. Pagination
3. Vacation.
A note on the publisher: NAA itself was a merger — the association was formed in 1992 when ANPA combined with the Newspaper Advertising Bureau and several other newspaper groups, which is why the article can move so easily between “ANPA/NAA.” In 2016 NAA renamed itself the News Media Alliance. The magazines didn’t survive. Neither Presstime nor TechNews is published today.