DIGITAL REVOLUTION
Newspaper production has evolved at lightning pace since the days of hot metal, writes
One of the first sights for any visitor walking into the main offices of the
Bangkok Post is the sight of a manual printing press, an anachronism in today’s digitised world.
Only slightly larger than a tuk-tuk, the press comes complete with the small metal letters that used to be painstakingly loaded into composing sticks, word by word and paragraph by paragraph. Compositors were valued for the dexterity of their hands, the acuity of their eyes and their seemingly magical ability to load each glyph despite appearing backwards to the eye.
The computer age changed all this, of course. It’s been decades since anyone in the newsroom used a manual typewriter. In the 1970s, a new company called Atex was born with the idea of building an electronic composing system where stories were assembled not from individual letters in a laborious, manual process but rather digitally through a computer.
The company’s flagship product was known as the J11, a mainframe computer system involving a green-and-white video display and a heavy metal-framed keyboard with customised keys. Journalists no longer could blame typos on the composing room, as what was seen on screen was essentially what appeared in the paper.
While quick typing remained a valuable skill for journalists, the introduction of computers and video displays forced many to adapt and learn new skills, including arcane commands to “open” a story, “message” colleagues or make a word appear in “bold”. These digital stories would then be printed, with the strips of each column assembled to form a page and then a large plate that was sent to the press.
The 1990s and the rise of personal computers saw another revolution in the newsroom. Now entire pages could be designed and built digitally rather than assembled separately from scraps of paper and film. The Atex J11 and its clunky keyboard gave way to personal computers that enabled journalists to see how stories would look once printed.
As computer technology developed, so did communications technology. Prior to the advent of mobile phones or fax machines, let alone email and the internet, Bangkok Post journalists either filed stories by coming to the newsroom to type up their copy or by finding a telephone to recite the salient facts to an editor, who would then do the typing for them. Wire syndicate stories about the rest of the world would come to the newspaper through a teleprinter.
The 1990s saw the introduction of wireless communications, starting with pagers, wonderful devices that would beep or vibrate whenever an editor started to become nervous about whether a story would materialise by deadline. Later, staff were equipped with Motorola DynaTAC mobile phones, affectionately called “dinosaur bones” by some, featuring a long rubberised antenna and a red LED display.
The growth of the internet and email were equally revolutionary for journalists. Obscure facts previously gleaned only after hours of painstaking research could now be found from each writer’s computer. Indeed, reporters could sidestep editors altogether and reach readers directly, first through email groups or bulletin board groups, later through personal blogs and now through social media.
The information age and telecommunications technology have given everyone the ability to build and stand on their own soapbox, to advocate, report, criticise or expostulate on the topic of their choice.
The impact of a connected world on the traditional media has been tremendous. While journalists and publishers today can produce content more efficiently than generations past, so can everyone. With content now available anywhere, at any time, via personal phones and computers, what is the rationale for a reader to wait until the morning for the delivery of their newspaper, let alone once per week or month for a magazine? In many markets, readers have already decided there is no rationale, judging by the sharp decline in print newspaper and magazine circulation in recent years.
It is not unreasonable to say that the days of daily newspapers are numbered and that technological advances will one day lead to the complete extinction of the print media as society goes completely paperless and electronic. Yet the audience of the Bangkok Post is of a different order of magnitude today thanks to the prevalence of the internet and modern telecommunications. The public demand for news and information has not abated and should only increase, albeit in a manner no longer tied to ink and paper.