История письма и чтения. Асафова Г.К. - 118 стр.

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Technological developments

Computers and telecommunications have transformed the production

process for the modern newspaper. They have also led to changes in the quality of

the newspaper itself, but their real impact has been on the finances of the

newspaper industry and on the relevance of the traditional print workers. One of

the first signs of technology's potential for change came in the 1930s, when Walter

Morey developed the Teletype setter (first demonstrated in 1928). This machine

was an improvement on the telegraph, which was widely used by reporters in the

field and by the wire services, such as Reuters and Associated Press, to send news

items in draft form to editorial offices miles away. With the Teletype setter, the

impulses sent over the wire included encoded instructions to Linotype machines.

The machines could then decode the instructions and automatically prepare whole

pages ready for printing. It was therefore envisaged that the reporter would have

the facility for “direct input” into the printing room, which would eliminate the

need for retyping by a Linotype operator and thus save newspapers both time and

money.

But direct input had to await the development of sophisticated computers

and computer programs, which did not materialize until after World War II. In

1946 the first techniques of photocomposition were developed. With this method

of typesetting, the images of pages are prepared for the printer photographically, as

on a photocopier, instead of in lines of metal type. The new method was introduced

gradually in newspapers, where the Linotype machines had worked well enough

for more than half a century and where union opposition to the new technology

was deeply entrenched. Technological advances were accelerated in the 1970s,

introducing computers and computer programs that were tailor-made for the

newspaper publisher, and many newspaper companies replaced their 19th-century

printing systems with the new technology almost overnight.

In a modern newspaper office each journalist has a desktop terminal–i.e., a

keyboard and a visual display screen connected to the main computer. The visual

display shows the current article or, in the case of a copy editor, the whole of the