Production day.
This is a process that involves putting the paper
together. It used to be a literal
process that involved photocopying and typesetting and lots of rubber
cement. If you don’t know what rubber
cement is, here’s a primer. First off,
it has nothing to do with concrete. In
fact, it’s the opposite to the stuff we construct buildings out of. Rubber cement is soft and elastic and it
sticks to anything it’s applied to.
Artists and newspapers and advertising layout people (think Mad Men)
would use it to paste together bits and pieces into a coherent collage that
made up an ad or a page in the newspaper—actually two pages because the layouts
were in two page spreads.
Rubber cement was magic stuff because you could place and
replace a piece of a layout (photo or block of type) time and again without damaging
the piece being moved or the background.
It also made swell fake scars if you applied it to your skin then folded
the skin over. A rite of passage for
newbies in a newspaper office was to have someone they hadn’t met yet show up
at their desk with a large jagged scar slashed across their cheek, then engage
in a conversation and watch the newcomer squirm as he or she tried desperately
not to look at the disfigurement.
Another, less subtle hazing stunt involved getting an apprentice printer
to hover his hand over a roller covered in black ink by telling him to feel how
hot it was. The journeyman would then
slap the rookie’s hand down onto the roller.
Black printer’s ink does not was off, it only wears off so the
apprentice wore the evidence of his gullibility for a long time. Guess that sort of thing would be seen as
harassment nowadays.
The other part of putting together a newspaper layout in the
BD (before digital) age was the complicated and time consuming business of
creating photographs. Sometimes I find
myself mesmerized by how fast and easy the new processes are. Would go so far as to say that I long for the
old ways and days, but there was a connection to a skill set then that just
isn’t there now.
I can remember running from the office just before press
time to try and get some pictures of a house fire. As I ran up the lane behind the house, two
volunteer firemen ran out of the house carrying a little boy. As they hurried him into the ambulance, I had
one chance for a shot of the face of the
fireman who was giving the boy mouth-to-mouth resuscitation as he ran towards a
waiting ambulance. I had to run back to
the office, lock myself in the darkroom,
feed the raw film onto a developing spool, develop the film, find the
negative I wanted, put it in a lamp enlarger, then print an image of
publishable quality, all in about 15 minutes in order to meet the
deadline.
If that same incident happened now, taking, processing and
producing a printable image with a digital camera would be a snap.
Anyway… all this reminiscing is simply to say that my
Wednesday job is a lot more easy now.
With internet links to news streams, layout software and
programs like Photoshop I can put the paper together in an hour or so. I can also slot in additional advertising
that shows up at the last minute, or insert breaking news anytime up until a
couple of minutes before the presses start running.
And all this technology saves me hours of driving every week
because I can send the finished layout to the printer, a couple of hundred
miles away, with the click of a mouse.
Busy day, so that’s enough of that.
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