This is an important notice to readers: You may not be able to comment on AlbertaPolitics.ca posts this weekend. If you encounter that difficulty, it’s not you, and it’s not personal. Your ability to comment will return.
Change comes to us all, and this blog must change to a new online host, a “migration,” as the tech boffins say, that needs to happen this weekend.
“What could possibly go wrong?” asks a commenter on the previous post. Plenty, probably. Beats me. I’m not the techno guy. When I started in the newspaper business, news stories were written on manual typewriters on little sheets of newsprint called “takes,” and prepared for the presses on giant linotype machines that looked like the ones in the photo above.
I’m not kidding. The only difference from the ones at the old unhyphenated Victoria Daily Times where I was first paid to write news stories was that the guys operating them really did wear armbands and visors, I kid you not. The room in which they worked smelled of metal filings, and probably wasn’t all that healthy a place to breathe all day. I was also as noisy as Bedlam, and I don’t recall the gentlemen who worked there wearing earplugs, either.
But who says computers are good for you? They certainly weren’t good for the quality of newswriting. The reason, it is said here, is that nobody learns how to improve their writing if they don’t have to stand still and pay attention while an ancient copy editor with bad breath and fingers stained yellow by nicotine instructs them rudely on how to write a coherent story.
This could be humiliating, but it concentrated the mind somewhat, if not quite as wonderfully as a hanging in a fortnight. Electronic filing ended that, and journalistic prose has suffered as a result. But I digress.
What is going to go wrong – only for a few hours, it is profoundly to be hoped – is that readers won’t be able to comment for a spell. Please be patient if you encounter this difficulty. It will be temporary, and our commitment to printing a wide range of comments – every single one of them moderated by human eyes, viz., mine – remains firm.
Thank you for your attention to this matter!
Things happen, so I’ll be pat.
I believe you are telling the truth and yet it could be a ploy to enter the Guinness book of records for the most comments ever, or possibly only a personal record because who could resist commenting?
Anyway , let it be known that you are and have been one of the best corners on the internet, one of our last stand fully organic cherished writers.
Best of the season to ya, bro. Live long and prosper 🙂
Here here!
Etaoin shrdlu!
No fair, you almost made me choke on my cookie…
” Thank you for your attention to this matter “….LOL !!
Fingers crossed for you!
Randi-lee: All has gone well. DJC
As Dr. Freud might say: It could be verse.
I am looking to see if I can find those linotype machines….must be stored somewhere!!!!!
But you will never know that absolute joy of having a newspaper reporter arrive at a railway station with a news report to be sent by telegraph. Especially if one’s capabilities on the Morse wire is abysmal.
James: I came a little late for that. We were given a pencil and a reporter’s notebook, like a steno pad only narrow enough to stuff in a pocket. We were expected to file out copy from a payphone, and, as I recall, we had to supply our own dime. DJC
@DCJ Don’t forget RTF files because nobody had the same software as the publishers–who didn’t have all the same software. And that modem dial screech as you tried to tried to log on to send it in.
When I was a kid, my dad took me to his newspaper (The Boissevain Recorder) and I got to sit on the stool, beside the melting pot of lead bars, watching him on the linotype. I got to drink his coffee and eat Hawkins Cheezies. Then he sold and worked for the Grand Forks Gazette, in B.C., then off to Calgary to work for the Albertan. When the Sun bought the Albertan, he called it a gossip rag and went to the Calgary Herald, until he passed. But I’ll always remember the old linotype and the lead bars in the melting pot. I still eat Hawkins. LOL
Hello DJC and fellow commenters,
Glad to read that the transition to the new site was successful. What would we do without albertapolitics? Always interesting to read.
Thanks, Christina. Kind words. DJC
Yea, things seemed quirkier rather than nastier in those halcyon days. I miss events like the “F**k You Charlie” edition of Th Albertan in 1970 when 30,000 copies were printed and sent out for delivery before anyone caught it.
A disgruntled linotype operator had punched in those famous words in 12-point type for the front page lede (sic)story, assuming his proof reader spouse would catch the indiscretion.
I think I still have a copy of the so-called “F**k You Charlie” edition. And, no, I wouldn’t sell it for the world.
Andy: Readers will be interested to note that the notorious FYC edition of the Albertan began with the words, “Prime Minister Pierre Turdeau…” The original type creating the need to fill out the line to make removal of the type easier. Legend had it that the proofreader was fired and the linotype operator moved to The Herald, where he never did the same thing or anything like it again. I used to have a copy too, but, alas, it is long gone. DJC
Around 1996 I helped edit a local history with lots of picky details. The editor gave the text to a computer guy who was using some complicated publishing program that he could include photos in, etc. The editor was frustrated because he would spend hours with the computer guy making corrections, then the next time they looked at the text, the corrections were missing. (Not sure, maybe the computer guy failed to save the changes? Or had more than one version and opened the wrong version?) I think the computer guy ended up fired and someone else finished it.
Good argument for keeping everything in your own hands and keeping it simple, while listening to good suggestions from copy editors/conmmenters.