The end of an era

The end is near.
For satellite transmissions from The Associated Press, that is.
The AP, like every other news organization including this one, has been struggling to adjust to an ever-changing and rapidly changing media environment.
And like every other news organization, it’s stumbled now and then along the way.
The way The AP has delivered its news product has changed dramatically since I signed on as a reporter in The CR’s newsroom.
In those days, roughly the Pleistocene era, the report came via a dedicated telephone line that was received simultaneously by two machines at the newspaper offices.
One was the Teletype in the newsroom, which clattered out stories as typewritten copy on a long stream of cream-colored paper. When an exceptionally important breaking news story moved on the wire, the Teletype would ring a bell or maybe more than one to raise the alarm.
Meanwhile, back in the composing department, the same signal — roughly 32 words a minute, as I recall — was received by a machine that punched the information out as a series of holes on a paper tape. (When people refer to a “ticker tape parade,” they are referring to this sort of paper tape. It used to be standard equipment on Wall Street, but probably doesn’t exist anywhere except museums anymore.)
Part of the editor’s job was to break down the overnight stream of cream-colored paper, setting aside stories that might be of interest. If a story looked like it should go into the paper, the hard copy was measured with a yardstick. The rule of thumb was that it would be approximately half as long when printed in the paper than it was coming out of the Teletype.
The editor would then circle the number of the story. (Each story’s number had a particular code that designated whether it was state, general news, inter-national, Washington, or financial.) The hard copy would then be taken to composing, where folks who had learned how to read the numbers when represented as dots would locate the appropriate ticker tape.
That would then be fed through a phototypesetting machine to produce a galley of set type.
To say it was complicated and laborious doesn’t do it justice.
Computers changed all that, beginning in the late 1970s.
For The AP, the big shift came from using that land telephone line to transmitting stories via satellite to a dish receiver behind the newspaper building.
It was a great system, and I adjusted quickly to it. The only real hang-up was when we had a really wet snow. I soon learned to take a broom out to clean off the dish.
But technology never holds still.
That system soon gave way to a Web-based distribution of The Associated Press report. In many ways, it’s simpler and faster.
But, probably because I also date to the Pleistocene era, I haven’t adjusted as quickly this time.
When filling in for Mike Snyder or Ray Cooney in the newsroom, handling the wire report, I find myself using the Internet version for photos and to monitor late-breaking news while still using the satellite-delivered version for individual stories.
Why? I have no idea.
The non-Pleistocene newsroom employees abandoned the satellite report with ease. I’ve been holding onto it.
But, as I said, the end is near.
AP has said satellite transmission of the report will be eliminated soon.
I think it’s a bad idea because I like a certain amount of back-up and redundancy.
Relying solely on the Web leaves us more vulnerable than I’d like.
But like the Pleistocene, every era has to come to an end.[[In-content Ad]]