Don't stop the presses yet

When Jim Naughton stood in the middle of the newsroom of the Philadelphia Inquirer to announce that he was leaving, he wore a dinosaur costume. It was his own "wry comment on the doomsayers" who said that newspapers were the product of a previous era, dinosaurs that would soon be a memory or a footnote in the history books.

Mary Archbold, assistant chief of pagination, and Matthew Brown, associate city editor, create a page.

Ravell Call, Deseret News
Today Naughton, president of the Poynter Institute, predicts that newspapers will be around "for a good long time to come if they continue doing enterprise journalism and reporting in both depth and breadth."
The future of newspapers, he believes, will be found in the wedding of traditional, solid reporting techniques and the emergence of new technologies.
It is a wedding that has always driven and shaped newspapers — and newsgathering in general.
And the Deseret News is no exception.
The first dramatic changes came with improvements in the actual printing process.
It's hard to fathom how different it must have been to move from the days when "news" pamphlets were painstakingly printed on rudimentary early presses to the improvements available when the Deseret News was first printed in 1850 on a "modern" Ramage press that was hand-fed one sheet of paper at a time and could produce two small pages a minute.
In the 1890s, a Bullock press made it possible to print on both sides of a page, simultaneously. Less than a decade ago, the process went to offset presses that spoon one-ton rolls of newsprint and create 60,000 copies an hour.
Telephones in 1878 were the first major change in how information was gathered. Suddenly, the world was just a phone call away, breaking what had been nearly insurmountable barriers created by distance.
Almost 20 years passed before Linotype machines made typesetting faster, and in 1899 newspapers started printing photographs, using halftone photoengraving that forever changed the "look" of newspapers.
It would be another 36 years before those photographs could be transmitted over the wires. News stories had been traveling that way for almost a decade by then.

Dramatic changes
But the biggest changes have come in the past 30 years, one right after another: Photocomposition replaced hot-metal typesetting in 1972, and two short years later editors began plying their trade on video terminals.

Today's newspaper presses have made color illustrations commonplace and have improved the overall quality of printing in the Deseret News.

Ravell Call, Deseret News
By 1983, typewriters were very nearly a thing of the past.
These days, an old electric typewriter is occasionally used to address a single label or envelope in the newsroom. But that's about it.
In January 1983, the Deseret News converted its entire editorial process — from the reporter's creation of a story to an editor's revisions — to an Atex video display terminal system.
In 1986, we moved to a pagination system that allowed electronic page makeup, and shortly after that the art department started producing graphics and illustrations on computer. The old "morgue" — newspaper slang for the archive of news story clippings — was stored on computer that year, too.
Still the changes kept coming, seemingly faster and more dramatic.
In 1989, Deseret News photographers started using Leafax machines to transmit color photos over the phone lines. That meant a photo taken in St. George could be placed in the newspaper in Salt Lake City just minutes later — in plenty of time to make the same-day daily edition.
Then just last year, we tossed out the Atex system and its small army of sturdy video display terminals and replaced it with a Mac-based system. Now, our newsrooms and offices are filled with colorful Mac-based hardware.
The Deseret News' Mac color of choice?
Blueberry.
Technology has also affected news gathering techniques.
First there was the advent of a nifty telephone-like device that could send hardcopies of news releases and government reports to almost any newsroom in the world.
Fax machines marked the end of the time lag created while waiting for information to arrive in the mail, and they are still newsroom heroes.
And then there's the Internet.
Who would have predicted that e-mail would make gathering information nearly instantaneous? That photos in Argentina could be e-mailed to a Salt Lake newspaper faster than they could be walked from the darkroom to the scanner? Or that we'd even have scanners? That digital cameras would eliminate the need to take time to develop film? That a report downloaded from a Web site could go directly to an editor and then into pagination?

Surviving the Internet
Technology's march seems to have just begun. On the immediate horizon are digital printing presses, moving stories, advertising and graphics directly from the computer onto the printing press, without human intervention. Eventually, experts predict an electronic chain to the loading dock, where delivery people pick up the bundles to move them into neighborhoods and then onto front porches.

Jerry Wellman knows the ins and outs of the systems department, the heart of computer operations at the Deseret News.

Ravell Call, Deseret News
The Internet itself is one of the big players in the discussion of the future of newspapers. But while everyone agrees it's an important development, it's hard to find two people who agree on the role it will play.
"I don't think most newspapers have figured out how to use the Web," said Nolan Walters of the National Press Foundation.
If the Internet stands ready to replace newspapers, it's not readily apparent, according to Bill Gloede, group editor of Media Week and Editor & Publisher magazines.
"I don't believe the Internet is a threat to newspapers yet. As a delivery vehicle it is. As a medium it is not. I believe we will distribute newspapers that way someday. It may go to a printer or a future handheld device that's not a pain to use — that's simple, easy and comfortable. We don't have that yet."
Bruce Dold, deputy editor of the Chicago Tribune, agrees. "When newspapers started, the only competition was the pamphlet nailed to the front door. We survived radio. We survived magazines. We have survived."
The Internet's immediacy and popularity have sparked some concerns by newspaper journalists. But history, Dold said, is on newspaper's side.
"You have been able to get more immediate news from radio and TV, but the newspaper gives you immediate news in a context you can never get from radio and TV. And it's a context people aren't going to be patient enough to get from the Internet. People don't like sitting in front of a screen. They do it at work. They don't want to have to do it at home."
Microsoft founder and board chairman Bill Gates predicted that newspapers would survive until computer screens are as sharp and easy to read as newspapers. But they're not, the experts agree. Nothing beats a newspaper for sheer portability, whether you want something to read in the bathroom or on an airplane.
With the Internet, "you have to work at it a lot harder to get material in depth. There are great numbers of people who like the Internet — as I do— but would prefer to read on paper and wind up printing it out. That gives me hope," said Naughton.
"TV and radio have been around 50 and 80 years, and whatever damage they were going to do, they've done. I would hope to see newspapers buying radio and TV in their given markets (if the Federal Communications Commission lifts its restriction on such ownership, as it is currently considering) and using their resources to cover news better than ever in their communities," Gloede said.
TV, radio and newspapers can and are forming a constructive alliance, Dold said. Newspapers have a brand name that Internet startups don't have. "They are part of the community, and the task is to take that brand and that image and transfer it to a new medium.
"At the Chicago Tribune, we're saying people want information in many different ways. We'll try to provide that in whatever way they want to get it. We want to be there and be there and be there with a name they trust. We are feeling our way around on that. That's the gist of what we are trying to do now. Reporters at the Tribune like as not do not simply put ink on paper. They go on TV. They go on radio."

Information in depth
As for the Internet, "people have not turned to it for that kind of information. It has been around for six years in an accessible form, and there is not a single successful content-based Web site."

A good operator could set 30 lines of type in one minute on the Linotype machine, now on display at the Deseret News.

Ravell Call, Deseret News
While they all use variations of the word "bright" to describe newspapers' future, it will ultimately depend on two things, industry watchers agree — engaging young people as newspaper readers and providing them with information they want to read in a format they like.
"There is unmistakably a different pattern with young computer users," Naughton said. "It is not clear if they are going to become newspaper readers with anything near the same numbers as we geezers are. But just as our fathers and grandfathers had the experience, when they become homeowners and taxpayers big time and searchers after good schools, I think they are going to want the depth and breadth of information. If newspapers continue to provide that in a way that is greatly efficient, then I think newspapers are going to be relied upon for some time."
There's no question that newspaper circulations, by and large, have gone down. But many industry experts believe that readership has gone up — in part because of the Internet. Many newspapers are selling advertisers on the concept of large numbers of readers, rather than subscriptions. And newspapers need advertisers to pay the bills.
A few newspapers have experimented with creating a "personalized" newspaper, designed with an individual's interests in mind and sent to printers in neighborhood stores or individual homes. It has been touted as the future of newspapers.
It's not a simple process, according to Dold. "We've kicked around the idea of a personalized newspaper, but it's tough logistically to pull off."
Most newspaper publishers have looked for what Naughton calls a "magic way to make production of the newspaper less costly and more effective, but nobody has achieved that. If there was a way to print it in something approaching its current format that can be printed cheaply and easily in your own home and office and be available whenever you want it and updated regularly, that has real promise. But so far, attempts have been made to move people from reading on paper to reading on something else without good results."
As for content, newspapers need to decide who they are and whom they serve. They are first and foremost, Gloede said, a link to the local community. He calls newspapers a "smorgasbord served up every day." And he thinks that newspapers may have hurt themselves by trying to make readers believe they should read everything. People who don't have time may turn away.
"If you want to read business and throw away features, that's OK. You're still getting a huge bargain.
"It gives you a different rhythm of information every day, but you don't get horribly bored by it. And you don't have to memorize it. . . . We have tried to condition the audience to do things the way they should, rather than the way they want to. It should be a worthwhile experience, and we should stop chastising them."
Gloede said newspapers exist to reflect communities. It is something "newspapers still do better than anything else."

E-MAIL: lois@desnews.com

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