| Show CHAPTER FOURTEEN The Lure Of Newspapering From its earliest days until what has subsequently been described as The Offset Revolution producingsmall-town weekly newspaper was seldom easy And with few exceptions it was notpath to riches Ben Blackstock general manager of Oklahoma Press Association emphasized that point in1964 talk Only the misinformed hold to the idea that publishingnewspaper is an easy way to get rich he said Makingprofit on eitherdaily or weekly newspaper isdemanding task in the many skills it requires But as Price historian Mrs Sheldon Edith Allred once observed while tracing the history of the Sun-Advocate that communityweekly The incurable itch of writing possesses many Beingnewspaperman or woman truly is demanding as Blackstock said And it was even more so in an earlier time Probably ita trifle easier today than in years gone by when it was indeedharsh taskmaster The time schedule was unforgiving because production was torturously slow Hands not machines were everywhere in the process Writers pro duced their copy with pencils or quill pens before the typewrit er came into common use Type was laboriously set one indi vidual character after another Copies made from that type after it was assembled into pages were literally crushed out one attime by frustratingly sluggish presses In retrospect it hardly seems possible men and women of the 1800s would have so enthusiastically embracedtask so difficult to perform Today the combination of computers skillful camera techniques and rapid web offset presses has reduced the production factor tomere shadow of what it once was Far from handwritten copy editorial staffs utilize computers to compose their stories in many cases their actual key-strokes 265 Digital image 2005 Marriott Library University of Utah Al rights reserved |
