We all sat round a large table that was divided into ‘personal space’ by means of very low battens fixed to the surface. They weren’t high enough to stop anything drifting over from your neighbour’s space and there were frequent squabbles over people who didn’t keep control of their paperwork.
Everything was on paper back then, especially the stories we wrote, so there was a great deal of scruffiness going on. Life was quite hectic on the days running up to the deadline. The Chronicle – or The Chron as everyone called it – was a weekly paper, so it went to press every seven days. For a couple of days after that we were reasonably quiet, but the pace picked up as the week went along and the day before deadline was busy. Far too busy to let anyone tidy up.
We sat around the table, two down each side and one at each end, with a typewriter in front of us and surrounded by bits of paper. There were phones on the desk, of course, so we could contact the outside world if we needed to, and there were low-slung lights hanging from the ceiling, with cone shaped shades so they cast all their light downwards towards our work area.
If you needed space to work by hand, such as when you made a phone call and were taking shorthand notes of the conversation, you tipped your computer up onto its back and pushed it towards the centre of the table to make room. Consequently the space between the typewriters, at the centre of the literal ‘newsdesk’ became stuffed with crumpled sheets of paper from a huge variety of sources.
Once in a while we would have a sort out and throw some of it away, but mostly it was a tip. I can’t imagine how anyone would get away with it these days because we all smoked back then. It was common for a work place to be shrouded in a thick fug of smoke. No going outside for a ciggie back then. Ashtrays overflowed into the paper pile at the centre and it’s a miracle that no-one went up in flames. In fact the only time I ever saw an actual fire was when somebody decided to empty an ashtray into a waste paper basket. It was a metal one, and some quick-thinking person threw the remains of a cold cup of tea over it and doused the conflagration.
There was another pretty serious hazard in the old days too. Everyone had a lethal piece of kit on their part of the desk called a ‘spike’, because that’s precisely what it was. It consisted of a long, thick wire, sharpened at one end and set into something heavy at the other end. The sophisticated ones could be unscrewed from their base so that you could reach the blunt end easily but others were just set into something heavy, like a lump of lead. The purpose of this ridiculous item was to serve as a filing system. If you had a sheet of paper such as a press release that had important details on it, like how to contact someone, or figures that you’d used in a story, you would slam the paper down onto the spike so it could be stored on your desk.
Sensible people bent the top of their spike over so they had to ease filed papers onto it gently, rather than risk putting the wire through their hands. It also meant that if anyone tripped over something and landed on the desk (not as unlikely as it sounds – we were quite unruly people!) they didn’t end up with a sharp needle through the chest! Everyone’s spike was personal. You wouldn’t dream of filing something you’d used on someone else’s spike, and you wouldn’t dream of looking through the old papers on anyone else’s spike without their permission. I used to fold papers up before I spiked them and put them on carefully so they didn’t take up much space. Others just spiked them flat, so the surface area of desk they took up was about A4 by A4. To make matters worse we still had a few people using foolscap back then for officialdom, so an occasional piece stuck out even further.
But I folded mine and left them neatly arranged parallel with each other. It meant that I could find information easily and didn’t have to take anything off the spike to get at what I wanted to know. Letter heads would have addresses and phone numbers and even logos neatly in the top right corner, so I could sift quickly through the folded bits to get to what I needed. Of course once in a while you had to get at the rest of the information on the page – especially if it was a letter or a press release. That was when the scruffies had the advantage because they could ease the upper items away from the paper and read across, ignoring the wire through the middle. With my scheme I had to take the paper off the spike and unfold it.
That was where the unscrewable base came in handy, because you took off the base and slid all the papers down the wire and off the bottom until you got to the piece you needed. (Or you slid them upwards if it was a more recent paper.) But at least with a removable base you had a choice. If you were really in a hurry you’d just rip the thing away, remembering to ‘keep the place’ by creating a gap where the old thing was. And if you were sensible you put it back when you were done, because you never knew when you’d need that information again!
When you wrote a story back then it was put onto small pieces of paper. They were about two thirds the size of modern A5 and they were used landscape, not portrait. That was to make it easy to fit onto the printer’s compositor machines. The ‘comps’ as we called them, had clips on their machines to fix the paper at eye level and copy type into the mechanism. Their keyboards were a mystical arrangement based on the old drawers of loose type from centuries ago when type was first invented. The commonest letters “ETOIN SHRDLU” were closest to the bottom of the keyboard, just as they were in a drawer of type, and the less common ones like Q, X and Z were around the edges.
A modern ‘Qwerty’ keyboard uses a similar system, except the arrangement includes a mechanical dodge to prevent the typewriter from jamming. The keys are arranged so that the commonest are close to the centre, but they are also set up so that the mechanical arms were less likely to get in each other’s way. So S and H, for example, are on opposite sides of the keyboard so you use opposite hands and they have time to return to their proper places whenever you type ‘sh’, which happens more than you’d think. None of this is relevant in a modern computer keyboard, but the existing qwerty layout is a throw back to mechanical typewriter days.
So, when you wrote a news story it was set out in a special way to help everyone who handled it after you. If you look at a newspaper you might find that the first word in a story is in all capital letters. If it’s a main story on the page you might also find that the first one or two paragraphs are in a larger type face. (Font size. That’s another hangover from the old days. A ‘font’ was what they called the complete set of letters in the drawer of type. It’s also why they call it upper and lower case. Because the capital letters, which weren’t used as often, were placed above the little letters. Imagine a type setter having to reach out for each individual letter to set out a line. The ones that were most used were near the front. The lesser used capitals were further up. To save on the arm movement. This bracket should really have been a footnote because it’s a lot longer than I planned!)
In order for the typesetter to know which font size to use he had to have instructions written on the bit of paper with the text on. It was the sub-editor’s job to plan pages and work out the layout. An upper page or lead story was probably in a larger font than lower down the page. Often the first two paragraphs were in a different, larger size than the rest of the story. The sub would write on the paper an instruction that said something like “first par 14 point first word all caps” Par 2 12 point”.
The journalist would never put more than two paragraphs on the first piece of paper so the sub had room to write and the comp had clear instructions. Paragraph three and beyond went on to another piece of paper.
There were two other things that needed to be traceable along the line through the print system. One was who wrote the story, the second was which paragraphs went together, in which order. Your name (in full so that they knew how to spell it if you got a byline!) went in the top left hand corner. In the top right hand corner you put a single word that summed up what the story was about. For example, if I was doing it with what I’m currently writing I might use Lincoln. So, the first sheet was labelled Lincoln 1, the second sheet was Lincoln 2 and so on. You had to choose a word that wasn’t being used elsewhere, so a four page pull out about the city of Lincoln would get very confusing if everyone used that. So I might use layout, or newsroom, or something like that. If it was desperate I could use Lincoln newsroom, but two word catchlines were frowned upon.
The phrase was set with the text by the compositor and continued the journey until the pages were laid out close to the end of the process. In theory the setter removed them all once the type was in place, but sometimes they were missed. And that’s when you realised why they drummed into you from the very beginning not to use anyting comical, offensive or potentially defamatory. Because you could be sure it would be the one time it got left in and was seen by the thousands of readers.
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