Making the news
Publishing from every pocket brings the zenith of expression and the nadir of chill
The printing press was a disruptive technology, and industrial advances have driven mass media ever since. Through the 1960s and 70s, phototypesetting replaced 19th century hot metal systems that cast lines of type as operators entered them from a mechanical keyboard. Instead of lining up glyphs (cut or cast characters) and pressing them onto ink, then paper, to print pages, photo-setting machines created columns of text by projecting glyphs from glass masters.
In magazine production, copy was sent out to be photo-set, returned, marked with corrections, reset, and pasted onto an art board with line graphics and half-toned pictures to complete a camera– ready copy of the page layout, from which a printing plate was made.
Adding electronics produced machines like the Linotype CRTronic 360, resembling the early suitcase–style PCs, with a 5.25–inch floppy disk drive and a green screen on which text and formatting commands were entered. But real change came in 1985, when Aldus introduced PageMaker on the Mac, based on Adobe’s PostScript page description language. Later rivaled by QuarkXPress and superseded by InDesign, its WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) layout made desktop publishing (DTP) an integrated task with less and less need for outside expertise and specialized equipment.
All together now
If DTP democratized print, the internet was bringing a more radical revolution. It’s getting harder to remember a time when the words ‘social’ and ‘media’ referred to two different things. Online services such as Apple’s eWorld, launched in 1994, offered news, chat rooms, and
If DTP democratized print, the internet was bringing a more radical revolution
email as separate features. As the web took over, newspapers and TV companies launched slick home pages that began to cannibalize their paying audiences.
And there was blogging. Setting up a blog (meaning ‘web log’) allowed anyone to offer opinions, anecdotes, and obsessions to the whole of civilization on a rolling basis. Photos were still a rarity, but low–res clip–art GIFs and blink tags upped the cool factor. Platforms like Angelfire, LiveJournal, Blogger, Myspace, and WordPress saved writing your own HTML and made it easier to manage content.
Today, a few content management systems (CMSes) are the basis of the vast majority of websites, erasing the line between personal and professional media — an effect accelerated by the growth of social networks and the timeline, which presents selfies from your friends alongside feeds from the local, national, and global news media, all rapidly curated on your behalf by algorithms.
And so we arrive in an age when anyone can publish anything, but celebrities are bullied off Twitter and real news is called fake news by politicians bolstered by viral propaganda. Mark Zuckerberg defending mass exploitation of personal data isn’t the future we anticipated, but you can bet technology and its consequences will never stop changing.