Almanacs “On Native Ground - American Reporter” plus 4 more

On Native Ground - American Reporter
The Almanac - Dec. 18 - Post Chronicle
Temp: 31° - Toledo Blade
The Almanac - OfficialWire
A perfect score is 34 - Philadelphia Daily News

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Posted: 18 Dec 2009 06:33 AM PST

On Native Ground
MY BACK PAGES: WATCHING MY CRAFT CHANGE OVER 30 YEARS
by Randolph T. Holhut
American Reporter Correspondent
Dummerston, Vt.

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DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- I got my first job in journalism at the age of 18 in the spring of 1980. I was a freshman in college and landed a night shift gig at WSPR, a radio station in Springfield, Mass.

News came over an Associated Press teletype machine at 65 words a minute. Changing the heavily inked ribbons was always a chore, not to mention making sure the paper didn't run out.

Stories were typed on battered old manual typewriters that dated back to the 1940s.

Computers? Still a new-fangled technology that hadn't yet seeped down to this level of the business.

The Internet? There were only a few hundred people using it. If you needed to look up an address, you got a phone book or a city directory. If you needed to confirm a stray fact, you pulled out The World Almanac.

They were still using reel-to-reel tape recorders, and a razor blade and Scotch tape were your tools for editing audio. It was still an analog world, with dials and meters and black telephones with dials.

In the fall of 1985, when I started working in newspapers, video display terminals were cutting edge technology. Two years later, I went out and got my first computer - a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 laptop. With its built-in 300 baud modem, I could file a story anyplace I could find a pay phone.

Cellphones? That was as futuristic as the communicators they used on "Star Trek."

There were still a few smokers in the first city room I worked in. The barroom downstairs was still a place where you could find reporters between shifts. The building also shuddered just a little from the giant presses when they fired up, and the stairwells were coated with a thin film of ink.

That first newspaper company I worked for - the Worcester (Mass.) Telegram and Evening Gazette - had four morning and six afternoon editions and a dozen bureaus in the county it published in. There were two separate news staffs, and even though they worked for the same company, the competition was still fierce.

One of my several jobs was working in the morgue - the newspaper's library - where we still clipped stories out of each day's edition and filed them away in envelopes. When a reporter or editor needed background on a subject, my job was to retrieve the right folders with the right clippings in a room filled with hundreds of cabinets with files that went back decades.

Pneumatic tubes brought pictures up to the composing room, and page proofs came down to the copy desk the same way. The darkroom was just that, a dark room filled with a dozen photo enlargers and photographers rushing make prints on deadline. I eventually learned how to do darkroom work and how to go from taking the film out of the camera to producing a finished print in under 30 minutes. The photos from the AP came one at a time from a LaserPhoto printer, in 8 minute intervals. Waiting for photos was a constant hassle.

The old photographers I encountered then were old enough to have used Speed Graphics - the bulky, hard-to-focus 4 x 5 inch cameras that were the newspaper standard from the 1920s to the 1960s.

The old compositors I encountered then were old enough to remember linotypes and the smell of melting lead.

The old editors I encountered then were old enough to remember pastepots and black pencils and making and remaking a newspaper on the fly with a few written instructions and a lot of teamwork in the mechanical departments.

Pagination - making a pages on a computer - was just starting to creep into use. I remember the first such unit - a Mac Plus - which was used to make graphic. Within 10 years of seeing that Mac for the first time, I would be making pages on a computer. The compositors - the wizards with Exacto knifes that could do just about anything you asked, just don't touch the type, please - were out of a job.

Automation changed lots of things. I was replaced by a computer terminal in the paper's morgue. Indexing was now done with a few keystrokes, not with a heavy steel straight edge tearing pages. Digital photography made the darkroom obsolete. The teletype printers disappeared, and wire service news came flying into the mainframe computers at thousands of words a minute.

And now I feel as ancient as the people I met when I started out, the tribe that started out in the 1940s and 1950s, when newspapers were king and the work that reporters did was the stuff of movies.

Twenty years ago this month, I went through my first buyout. The T & G had been sold two years before, and changes were in the works. Being a junior member of the staff who lashed three part-time jobs into something of a living, I was thrown overboard immediately. But I was struck by how many people, the elders of the paper that I looked up to and learned from, chose to take a buyout and leave than stick around and face an uncertain future. Most of that generation left, and I got my first education on the harshness of the newspaper business.

The morning and evening papers merged the following year. The T & G's bureaus started to disappear. The presses moved out of the hulking old building on Franklin Street and went to a remote site a few miles away. The papers were sold again, this time to The New York Times Co. They eliminated zoned editions this year and the paper is struggling to survive.

Since that bleak Yuletide two decades ago, I've been through three more newspaper sales. I've become an elder, talking about the old days of afternoon papers, pasting-up pages, teletypes and darkrooms to a generation that Googles phone numbers and needs MapQuest to find an address. And I've watched my profession go from fat and sassy to threadbare and dying in one generation.

I'm still young enough to be a bridge between the analog and digital eras, and still looking forward to the shape of journalism to come. The tools we have now to tell stories were barely dreamed of when I started out, but I recognize how important they are and working to master them. We just have to remember that the need to tell stories is primal, and that storytellers will always be needed.

What will the young reporters I work with now be saying when they look back at their careers 20 years from now? Will they be talking about that gruff and crabby gray-bearded editor they had as their first mentor? The rickety first-generation iMacs that they have to use to write their stories on? The lack of reliable Internet and cellphone service? Or will they talk about working in newspapers at a time when they became quaint relics of a bygone age?

My love for the printed page is still abiding, but it's hard to remember what it was like before the Internet, before desktop computers, before digital cameras and voice recorders, before the avalanche of data that pours from the Web each day, before the 24-hour news cycle, before all the changes that I have seen in nearly three decades of broadcast, print and online journalism. The past is a nice place to visit, but the future is still the place I hope to see.

Randolph T. Holhut has been a journalist in New England for nearly 30 years. He edited "The George Seldes Reader" (Barricade Books). He can be reached at randyholhut@yahoo.com.

The Almanac - Dec. 18 - Post Chronicle

Posted: 18 Dec 2009 04:59 AM PST

Today is Friday, Dec. 18, the 352nd day of 2009 with 13 to go.

The moon is waxing. The morning stars are Venus, Mars, Saturn and Mercury. The evening stars are Neptune, Jupiter and Uranus.

Those born on this date are under the sign of Sagittarius. They include Joseph Grimaldi, known as the "greatest clown in history," in 1778; English physicist Joseph Thompson, discoverer of the electron, in 1856; British short story writer Saki (H.H. Munro) in 1870; Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin in 1879; Swiss modernist painter Paul Klee in 1879; baseball star Tyrus "Ty" Cobb in 1886; film director George Stevens ("Shane," "A Place in the Sun," "Giant") in 1904; actress Betty Grable in 1916; West German statesman Willy Brandt in 1913; actor Ossie Davis in 1917; Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards in 1943 (age 66); film director Steven Spielberg ("Jaws," "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial," "Schindler's List") in 1946 (age 63); movie critic/historian Leonard Maltin in 1950 (age 59); actors Ray Liotta in 1954 (age 55), Brad Pitt in 1963 (age 46) and Katie Holmes in 1978 (age 31); and singer Christina Aguilera in 1980 (age 29).

On this date in history:

In 1865, the 13th Amendment to the Constitution abolished slavery in the United States.

In 1912, after three years of digging in the Piltdown gravel pit in Sussex, England, amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson announced the discovery of two skulls that appeared to belong to a primitive hominid and ancestor of man. The find turned out to be a hoax.

In 1915, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, a widower for one year, married Edith Bolling Galt.

In 1985, the U.S. Congress approved the biggest overhaul of farm legislation since the Depression, trimming price supports.

In 1989, a pipe bomb killed Savannah, Ga., City Councilman Robert Robinson, hours after a bomb was discovered at the Atlanta federal courthouse. A racial motive was cited in a rash of bomb incidents.

Also in 1989, the Romanian government sealed the borders amid reports of a deadly crackdown on dissidents.

In 1990, Moldavia became the sixth Soviet republic to refuse to participate in a 10-day meeting in a mounting affront to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

In 1991, General Motors announced it would close 21 plants and eliminate 74,000 jobs in four years to offset record losses.

In 1997, South Koreans elected longtime leftist opposition leader Kim Dae-jong president, marking the first time in the nation's history that a member of the opposition had defeated a candidate of the New Korea Party and its predecessors.

Also in 1997, the 6-mile-long Tokyo Bay tunnel connecting the cities of Kawasaki and Kisarazu opened. The project took 8 1/2 years to complete and cost $17 billion.

In 2003, teenager Lee Malvo was convicted of murder in the Washington area sniper attacks. His adult companion, John Muhammad, was convicted earlier by a jury that recommended the death penalty.

In 2004, the United States officially forgave all of the $4.1 billion owed the government by Iraq and urged other creditors to do the same.

Also in 2004, Britain's Prince Charles was reported leading efforts to end the death penalty imposed in some cases under Islamic law for Muslims who convert to other religions.

In 2005, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, 77, was hospitalized after suffering what was described as a mild stroke.

And, in 2005, Bolivia elected Eso Morales as its first Indian president.

In 2006, Robert Gates was sworn in as the U.S. Defense secretary. Two days later he flew to Iraq to assess the situation.

In 2007, at least four White House lawyers met with the CIA between 2003 and 2005 to discuss whether to destroy video tapes of secret questioning of two al-Qaida operatives, The New York Times reported.

Also in 2007, African National Congress delegates chose Jacob Zuma as their leader, ousting South African president Thabo Mbeki who had controlled the party for 10 years.

In 2008, Rwandan Col. Theoneste Bagosora was convicted of genocide by a U.N. court for his involvement in the 1994 massacre of 800,000 people.

A thought for the day: Anatole France said, "To know is nothing at all; to imagine is everything." (c) UPI

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Temp: 31° - Toledo Blade

Posted: 18 Dec 2009 05:07 AM PST

LANSING - For Michigan, this has been a year of losing things that were deeply interwoven into the fabric of the state's history. General Motors and Chrysler went bankrupt, and though they survived - at least for now - famous automotive models and brands died.

This fall, Gov. Jennifer Granholm vetoed $7 million for the oldest state fair in the nation, apparently meaning the death next year of the Michigan State Fair, which has been bringing town and country together, mostly at the fairgrounds in Detroit, since 1849.

Earlier, to howls of protest, she dismantled the state department of History, Arts and Libraries.

And now, an even older tradition is threatened. Thanks to the continuing budget crisis, one of the best books you probably never heard of will apparently be no more.

The Legislative Services Bureau indicated it will probably publish the famous red-bound Michigan Manual only online this year, if at all.

That news left Bill Ballenger, publisher of Inside Michigan Politics and himself a former state senator, "stupefied" and angry.

He fired off an e-mail to every influential member of the Legislature he could find.

"PLEASE don't do away with the hard copy Michigan Manual for 2009-10. How ironic it would be if the legislative branch dropped the guillotine on this historic publication, which in its entirety, is literally the only documentation of this state extending back to the beginning of our existence in 1837."

Frankly, this columnist has an emotional attachment to the Michigan Manual. With all due respect to Ohio and other states, it is by far the best state almanac I have ever seen. Like Mr. Ballenger and a few other history buffs, I collect them. He has some from the 1840s; the earliest one I have is from 1869.

The manual is sort of a mini-Michigan encyclopedia. It is a thousand or so pages of pictures, facts, maps, and, as the official state description indicates, "fundamental reference information about Michigan - its history, constitutional development, governmental organizations, and institutions."

Additionally, you can learn all about the state's universities, the prison system, state bird, flower, mineral, all that stuff. Look up something in current or past constitutions; see how your money is being spent, or get exact primary and general election returns.

Plus there are all sorts of neat facts in it; flipping though the current one, I discovered that the nation's first mile of concrete roadway was built on Detroit's Woodward Avenue exactly a century ago. The manual from a century ago looks exactly the same as today's, except it was hardbound and had wonderful pullout maps of the state's railway system. Eliminating this book would seem terribly shortsighted. Mr. Ballenger continues to fight to save it.

Earlier this week, he had a call from State Rep. Pam Byrnes, (D., Chelsea), who held out some hope the printed book could be saved if enough people registered their ire. "It may be possible, but it's not likely to include everything it has in the past," she said.

But state Sen. Tom George (R., Texas Township), a history buff as well as an underdog candidate for governor, was less hopeful. He told a reporter for the Michigan Information and Research Service that he wouldn't lead an effort to preserve it, noting, "We have to face the fact that the state is broke. It is a shame that our cultural assets are being sacrificed."

What's not clear is why the legislature doesn't A) raise the price from the current $25, B) go to on-demand publication of the manual, and/or C) contract it to a private printer.

Mr. Ballenger sounded a note of defiance in a recent e-mail, telling the legislators: "Someday, no matter what you decide to do now, the Manual will return in all its former glory, and people will talk darkly about what was done to this essential piece of Michigan's legacy during the "dark ages" of the 95th Legislature."

He still holds out hope that "there are enough of you who … will address this issue now and conclude: 'This shall not pass!' "

Latest Motown woes: Officially, unemployment in the Motor City is a staggering 27 percent. But when "discouraged workers" who have left the official labor force are counted, along with part-timers who want a full-time job, the figure may be, Mayor Dave Bing said recently, "closer to 50 percent." That was confirmed this week by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which put it at 44.8 percent.

If President Obama ever launches a new federal jobs program, it is hard to imagine any place more likely to be receptive than Detroit.

Jack Lessenberry, a member of the journalism faculty at Wayne State University in Detroit and The Blade's ombudsman, writes on issues and people in Michigan.

Contact him at: omblade@aol.com

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The Almanac - OfficialWire

Posted: 18 Dec 2009 03:41 AM PST