tim's experiment

Many observant readers of the SCMPost will have noted, perhaps with more amusement than dismay, that the paper managed to mark the demise of Osama bin Laden by breaking the first rule of journalism and spelling his name wrong.  Having fed the conspiracy theorists the idea of Obama bin Laden the paper then made another error in the correction, which suggests that someone was perhaps not concentrating. This sort of incident generally serves as a peg for age-encrusted former reporters like me to hang a gloomy tirade about the fact that times have changed for the worst and young people in the news business are not as careful as we were.

Well you are not going to get that here. I do not know if the Post prints more mistakes than it did when I first worked there in the early 80s.  But if it does, this is not a result of an increased human failure rate, but changes in the way things work.  In the days when a computer was a mysterious object with a room to itself at the local university, a piece of news was the work of many hands, all of them attached to functioning human brains. Your reporter typed on a piece of paper. In some offices he was expected to produce a carbon copy (known as a black) as well, but usually there was just one copy of the copy. The pieces of paper were intentionally small, because the story would have to be split up and put together again later in the process. So your story, now a pile of pieces of paper, would be passed to the News Editor, or some such title, who overlooked the reporters. He would probably glance at it to make sure that the story had lived up to its possibilities, and pass it to a person picturesquely entitled the Copy Taster. This person would assign it a space on a page, according to its comparative importance and other considerations. It would then go to a page designer, who would attach to it a series of instructions which would produce the desired shape on the page when the story was translated into type.

Then the story, plus instructions and pictures or other adornments, would be passed to another editor who would go through it in exquisite detail, correcting errors and adding instructions to the printers, to whom it goes next. But first, at least on careful newspapers with time, another editor would look through it to make sure the finished result made sense. Then, typically, you would drop it down a hole. The printing machinery was always on the ground floor because of its weight, the eidtorial was upstairs and one-way communication was often achieved through a vertical tube running down the building.

At this point the story fell into the hands of the type-setters and compositors. These were skilful and literate artisans whose training took much longer than ours did. The standard apprenticeship for a journalist was three years; for a printer it was seven. This was a cherished opportunity for bright working class kids who would be urged by older relatives to “learn a trade” to ensure their lifetime employability. Only males did it. Nowadays one would wonder why this was so but in those days it was a common feature of skilled manual jobs and we did not question it.

Your story would at this point be split up, because any part which needed a different type size or column width would have to be done on a different machine. After the type-setter had turned it into a lot of small pieces of metal they would be passed to a table called the random, each still accompanied by its original  piece of paper. Here the story would be reassembled. Its metai version would go in a tray called a galley, from which a galley proof could be made – which is where that phrase comes from. The proof and the original story on paper, would then be passed to another department, known formally as the Correctors of the Press and less formally as the proofreaders. In some newspapers this department was used to meet government requirements that a certain proportion of disabled people should be included in a firm’s employees, so everyone in the room seemed to have a limb missing. In other newspapers the overwhelmingly male atmosphere in the printing department was countered by the recruitment of lots of young women as proofreaders, leading to occasional complaints from their supervisor if the copy was too raunchy, in his view, for young ladies’ eyes.  In theory the proofreaders’ only job was to ensure that the type as set had followed the original copy. In practice a detailed examination of the story often disclosed other problems which could at this stage still be corrected. Meanwhile the story in type form would travel to a place called “the stone” because a slate-topped table was the traditional piece of furniture. Here a whole page would be assembled. At this point there would also be an editorial representative called the Stone Sub. In theory his only job was to resolve problems in fitting the stories into the page according to the plan provided. In practice the stories usually had to be cut a bit, so the Stone Sub would read the proofs as they arrived with an eye to parts which could be pruned without sending the whole story back for resetting. So again, another pair of eyes, another chance to rescue Mr Obama from a terrorist’s tomb stone.

I must not give you the impression that this system produced infallibly correct results. In fact when produced in this way The Guardian included so many misprints that even its own staff called it The Grauniad. But on the whole the system worked. Unfortunately from the point of view of avoiding mistakes most of it has been replaced by the computer. There is no paper copy, there are no type-setters or compositors, there is no Stone Sub and there are no proofreaders. Careful readers will note a small tragedy lurking here, with eager young men spending seven years learning a trade which was wiped out overnight by the microchip. Technology marches on, leaving mangled bodies in its trail. All these people who no longer have to look at a story leave more opportunities for error. To compensate we get the spell checker, but that is, as you might say, knot mulch kelp because it misses a mis-spelling if the erroneous word is a legitimate one in its own right.

A less technological question is the way we produce reporters these days.  When I started it was unusual to meet graduates in the business (outside the Financial Times) and only one UK university offered a journalism degree. Most reporters started on local newsopapers where they did rather boring and repetitive jobs reporting things like whist drives and school sports days, which did not do much for the writing skills but cultivated accuracy about names and numbers. Being a reporter was exciting but not prestigious and it attracted enterprising types who had had discipline problems at school. Nowadays you get complaints, at least in English-speaking countries, that the switch to a graduate in-take has filled the business with fully paid-up members of the middle classes who can draw an inverted pyramid but lack the skills or the inclination to hang about in grubby pubs on the scent of a good yarn. It would be easier to dismiss this as the wails of a few dinosaurs if the newspapers now staffed entirely by graduates and computers were not losing readership in most places…