No Paper Paper
Ouch. The news hit a few days ago as subtle as a hand full of horse shoes on a concrete floor. The largest daily paper in the state, maybe in the south, will end printing the paper on newsprint. About the first of the year it will all be on-line and The Atlanta Journal- Constitution will go to digital publication only.
According to the publisher, “The fact is, many more people engage with our digital platforms and products today than with our print edition…..” Which is to say that to most of its readers the paper is already digital.
This is going to discombobulate a lot of people. There are folks who are not hip to computers and digital gizmos such as tablets. They are as confused by a tablet as they would be by a pet octopus: How they (we) will navigate within an electronic daily paper is a mystery.
The conversation in my Sunday School Class overshadowed the lesson as people puzzled over how they will work the daily crossword with a tablet.
Some of us are “clippers.” We cut and save obituaries, recipes, interesting stories and litter the table with them. We keep them for the sake of keeping them.
My Phillips family kept clippings and scrapbooks of news stories relative to the community.
Those clippings come in handy when a local story pops up, such as the time a whole family was nearly wiped out by a live electrical wire.
How are we going to do that with a digital edition of the newspaper?
Before people were scared to death of lead, I began my term as a “printer’s devil,” which meant a printer’s apprentice.
Mr. John Anglin, editor of the Stewart- Webster Journal, “hired” me, as a six year old, to sit on the oily floor of the newspaper office and separate lead plates.
At that time, ads and photos were transferred to a lead plate, and that was nailed to wooden blocks for printing.
My job was to separate the various parts. Lead went into one wooden box, nails into a coffee can, the wooden block was tossed into a box and later used to fire a boiler.
The lead was melted and became fodder for a Linotype machine. Prior to the Linotype, words and sentences had to be set by hand, one character at a time.
With the Linotype, the operator typed a line of text which was created and could be set in a block to be printed.
I was paid in unsold comic books, which I took to school and sold for a penny each.
As funny as things work out, there are people holding a copy of The Stewart-Webster Journal, Patriot-Citizen, reading this note along with you, and it started out with me wiping lead dust off my hands on my jeans.
joenphillips@yahoo.com
