Wow. This film pretty much represents 50 years of my life until newspapers suddenly died, in 2008 for me. I've done every job shown in this film except for actually writing the news, from paperboy to photographer, to paste-up and pressman. When this film was made we were just converting from letterpress and hot type to offset and cold type. Very interesting piece of history Fran, thanks.
In the early 80's I was hired to help install a new phone system at the local newspaper. I got to see every nook and cranny of the facility. It was an incredible sight to see all of the machinery and people in action. Sadly, That facility is now closed and the newspaper is a mere shell of what is was. Unfortunately, the Internet has all but rendered the print edition obsolete. And the on-line stuff is so slanted one way or another that it is barely believable. I miss the great objective reporting as well as the people who staffed them. Great film Fran!
Thanks for the memories. As a reporter, my first paper in the 1970s was still hot metal, and the whole five-story building shook when the presses rolled. After that it was offset presses, IBM Selectrics and OCRs and Compugraphic typesetters before Apple and desktop publishing took over in the 1980s. By the end of my career, I was doing about a dozen of the jobs you see performed in the film.
10 years from now 99% of this year's youtube videos won't be watched by anyone ever again. But these fantastic videos are the exceptions! TIMELESS GEMS! btw am I the only one who saw jack lalanne?
Hi Fran, You have brought back great memories for me and I still have ink in my blood. I am an ex-pressman for offset web newspaper printing presses. All Goss presses. (I was also a paperboy/then young man with a paper route for around 11 years. Never could dream that I would actually run a press...but as life worked out it unexpectedly happened.) Had to give up on being a printer about 4 years ago...after oh...25+ some years... changing times and technology...the newspaper printing presses are now mostly gone at most newspapers except some of the big cities, but even some of these are gone. Farmed out to even competitors or commercial print shops. A lot of presses have been torn apart and scrapped at most newspapers. The printing numbers for distribution are at a sad state. The numbers left are extremely small for what was actually printed back in the days. And the number of pages not many... including a quite shrunken size of the paper. Just some comments...and some great but also sad memories. Thanks for this transfer to preserve some history of this and the others reels you have done.
@@gotherecom I am not going to go into this with you...I have seen your other comment also. Your horse comment can just go on and on with so many other things too... Point of my comment ... was memories as a printer. All the different presses I ran for my area, nothing was newer than 1970 went it went live after press was erected. These presses were engineered to last. Again just memories of someone who ran these things and the great people along the way.
@@DaveNarn The sound of starting them up and getting up to full run speed is such a cool sound... forever burned in my brain... even though having to leave this "world". At one shop I was at the press actually shook the whole building...the front offices and all reporters areas included...
I graduated with a degree in print journalism in 2006, and my first job out of college was being a news page designer for The Kansas City Star. This film really makes me nostalgic for the days that I had the opportunity to work in the news. I remember going across the street to the presses and watching the giant machinery print and package the final product before I would grab a bundle of papers and take them back to the newsroom for the remaining designers and copy editors to review. I also worked at the Wisconsin State Journal in Madison, which has a Goss offset press very similar, if not identical, to the one shown in the film. Working at newspapers in the 21st century has given a lot of folks, myself included, PTSD from witnessing or experiencing the massive cutbacks and layoffs as finance vultures try to "trim the fat." But even though I haven't worked at a paper since 2014, I will never forget the sense of satisfaction and accomplishment I would have each night after working with a dedicated team with a passion for the craft and creating the best newspaper we could each and every day.
I worked as an advertising graphic production artist/designer for the major paper in Phoenix and as an editorial photo editing/composing tech in Houston. For about six (total) years of my life I lived through most of what you described, and also worked with dedicated and passionate newspaper people - many of whom got laid off. I left the Houston Chronicle in 2012; the building I worked in was torn down a couple of years later (and a 50-story skyscraper put in its place) as they moved all production to the former Houston Post facility.
I'm always amazed at the speed of those presses - I bet there were a few nasty injuries, and a paper jam would get messy very quickly. As a kid I remember seeing the last of the presses running in Fleet St in London - papers came off conveyors which went straight into the trucks.
Hi, I am a recently ex-pressman. Yes, there have been nasty accidents at shops. Thankfully I have never seen the worst. I have known several pressman with some fingers and/or thumbs gone. I consider myself lucky... still have all...but did have some close calls... even though always aware of dangers... mistakes are made. On paper jams...it can be a nightmare at times... frustrating and you getting extremely dirty with ink also at times...raw ink does not just "wipe off" or "wash off" easily at all. And you are under pressure to get back up running...all print jobs are time sensitive!!!
Great film! Brings back memories of when I worked for a large news-gathering organization back in the late 70's, early 80's. I may be one of the youngest trained model 15 and 20 Teletype repair/rebuilding techs. Still were using them into the early 80's. Never experienced the letter-press production rooms, but plenty of big offset presses. And PDP-8s and 11s. Tho they had finally gone to terminals for editing. And RK-05 disc packs for storage.... Very interesting times. Learned a lot! Thanks for the memories! Stu
WOW! This is a trip on "the WayBack Machine" and a world that I was on the fringe of in '65 through '72 '. I'll spare others the details. It has indeed been a trip to remember. Thank you.
Ha! The punch tape controlled Linotype machine is a post-WWII invention, but Monotype had the typesetting and casting processes separated and coupled by means of 31-channel punch tape (yes, that's right: a 31 bit parallel iterface!) with pneumatic readout (i.e. compressed air was passed through perforations, then directed to little cylinders with pistons that could rise and block the movement of tongs and levers, which was transferred to the position on a matrix case denoting the current matrix to cast from). Monotype cast pages of text line by line, character by character. Linotype / Intertype cast pages of text line by line, first putting the matrices together, then casting a lead slug, and finally distributing the matrices to the magazine using a mechanism that recognized the presence of one or more of 8 notches on the back side of the matrix. With one notch always present, there could be up to 128 combinations of them, which is very similar to (and might actually be the predecessor of) what we know as ASCII code :) Back to the punch tape: there were transcoders from IBM style punch tape to Monotype 31-channel which was used even in the Monophoto phototypesetting machines. The company boasted ease of transition and interoperability between the old-style mechanical keyboards, modernized electronic keyboards, typesetting computers (they were around in the 1960s) and composition casters (hot-metal casting machines) or Monophoto filmsetters. There were like 5 generations of Monophoto, the initial two were based on the composition caster's construction, later ones were redeveloped. The company also developed the Lasercomp phototypesetting system that was revolutionary but didn't sell well as DTP was already around. Monotype stopped making machines in the '80s/'90s and moved into the digital type design. BTW. etaoin shrdlu.
The optical, chemical and electromechanical technical challenges met are impressive. Not to mention the personnel and hierarchical structure of the copy production and assembly! Fascinating. The technology of any process done repeatedly at high volume is inevitably optimized and refined. How different is the electronic world we live in today.
Well, that was a blast fom my past :) When I left school in '76 I went straight into an apprenticeship printing newspapers (so I was a lithographic printer and platemaker). Since then I have done every job in newspapers. Copy writing, layout, journalism, photo-journalism, editorial, typesetting, sales, delivery and running my own local papers. It was great watching the newspaper printers running those enormous Goss machines.
The look of the people, the clothing, office spaces -- I can hardly believe I was there in those days. Nothing like it exists anymore. And there never was and never will be again any place like the news biz!! Thanks for the memories!
You just have to be in awe of this process. And the team who filmed this. That liquid lead was intimidating. I imagine those plates are remelted. At 8:30, I swore I saw Jack LaLanne!
In the '90s I worked for a company that made computer-to-plate printing equipment: PostScript in one end, plates ready for the press out the other. The hard part turned out to be generating and managing enough input for their voracious appetites for data. Then making sure customers knew how to use their new toys. All just in time for the world to go digital, but that's another matter...
At end of school day, I used to walk from the bus stop to my home in East Side midtown Manhattan, past the presses of a daily newspaper. It was on 43rd St but I can't remember which paper it was. The loading docks were right there on the street. Hot and noisy as hell and the "printers devils" were always running around the end of the gigantic machines, just visible. One thing I'd like to point out are those neat little square white hats a lot of the pressmen are wearing in this movie. They are made fresh each day by the pressmen, out of scraps of newsprint. To keep the hot machine oil and ink out of their hair.
I worked pre-press for a newspaper. The real money is in the press - printing as many outside jobs as possible for commercial customers. Our in-house newspaper lost money due to lack of ad sales revenue and reduced circulation. I went from hand past-up copy shot on stat-cameras to computer to plate machines made by Creo and Kodak. One thing hasn’t changed.. you still live and die by the deadlines.
I never got to see offset printing at large scale, but in the early 1990s, I was taught how to run an 11"x17" offset press in high school. By then we were creating everything in Aldus Pagemaker (pre-Adobe), then generating paper printing plates printed on a 1200 DPI 11x17 imagesetter-style laser printer. The paper plates would only last for shorter print runs before coming apart (maybe 1000 impressions?), but it was still neat to blend the two technologies together. With the press properly adjusted and on good paper, we could also use a much finer halftone screen than 85 LPI. Good times!
Each time you post one of these finely digitized films, I’m taken back to my grade school days - I can hear the hard soles of our teacher clackin down the long hall from the a/v room, and the projector had a certain sound too, in rolls the magic movie machine and the teachers pets would all scramble to help assist with the loading and focusing of the film we were about to see. It was a special moment for me, as when the lights went out I felt at ease, because nobody could see me and for the short while the film was playing I felt at ease, knowing attention was drawn to the screen, and I felt less judged. I also loved to view these old films, as a self proclaimed nerd I’ve had an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and information about the world we live in. This was as close to you tube as we had back then, and it’s a special treat I do t think most people truly understand the meaning of fully. Thanks Fran we love you
My uncle was a reporter, worked his way to the Pulitzer the White House Press Corp, and bureau chief of the LA Times. On the other end, (and a far less glamorous) I started out as a paper boy, then to the newspaper plant itself. I worked in Distribution, where we took the papers off the presses, ads were inserted then bundled for the carriers. Only one time did I ever hit the red Stop The Presses button (and you’d better have a damn good reason) for seeing a huge typo on the front page. A small local paper with a daily circulation of about 55k.
We can't even watch a special interest film from 1971 without some copyright troll making sure that the music is never ever heard again no matter the context ? Sounds about right. And they say we aren't regressing.
I feel ancient. I barely can believe I was born that year! I'm perfectly happy with my smartphone 😸 I was always looking forward for things we watched in sci fi movies. It's difficult for people younger than me to believe how analog life was until recently in many countries. Great video, thanks for sharing!
When I was a kid in the '80s, sometimes my folks would ask our local paper for some offset plates they were done with. Made good sheet-metal for projects
When they said some of the printing was arranged by digital computer, and they showed a Digital (TM) PDP 8/1. It was a digital computer and a Digital (Equipment Corporation) computer! (Any other former DECies watch this channel?) A good thing about working on computers is you get to visit all kinds of companies, and I visited a newspaper (I think the Los Angeles Times) right after the Northridge Earthquake in the early 1990s (I worked for Digital Equipment in the VAX / Alpha days), and wondered, in the press room, how many times the word "earthquake" was flying past my head every minute!
The sheer amount of linotype, ink and newsprint consumed every day in almost every town and city is mind boggling. Staff from reporters and editors, art department, typesetters , pressmen to distribution and even kids with a newspaper route are featured here. All the workers that made and serviced those presses.Who produced those telephones, typewriters, teletypes, cameras and plate machines. Without fail the news got off the press and delivered to your door 7/365.
Recycled lead printing plate uses: primarily for us (kids) to remelt used, cut up plates to pour into molds to make fishing sinkers. Let's see, mid to late 60's era before the Elmira NY Gazette switched over to offset printing.
I was an offset pressman, but I worked with a lot of former "lead slingers" who became offset pressman when the press technology changed. Every one of them were fishermen also...yes sinkers made by them at work. Every shop I was at still had sinker molds still around even though the lead and those types of printing presses were gone. You made me smile here... 🙂
Another fabulous transfer. And your solution for the music "issue" was brilliant. Can't believe how solid the frame is, no gate chatter like when I used to project these things in the high school cafeteria. This is a wonderful series you're doing. Glad you held on to them.
Back in the 80s I had the opportunity to buy a Linotype machine that was being scrapped by a local newspaper. I alternate between deep sadness that I didn't take it and happiness that I dodged being saddled with a bulky money pit.
16:17 The guy with the smoking pipe 😂 I was born in 1971. I remember in 1979 when smoking on commercial airlines was still allowed. The plane was separated by smokers and non-smokers sections. I just don't understand what the airlines did if they had a high demand for one particular choice. Would the seats go empty? As for the newspaper boys at the end, I was a paperboy from 7th grade to 8th grade back in 1985-86. I couldn't believe the Northwest Herald was paying to through newspapers to people. I used to make it a game. I was trying to hit the target, right on the welcome mat or trying to beat my delivery time.
I got a little taste of working with punched tape readers and punchers just as their last remaining use seemed to be happening with machine tool controls (late 80s-early 90s), but I never realized it was used in newspaper production. Very interesting
Wow, does this bring back memories! I remember a day-long field trip in in 8th grade (1970) spent touring our local paper and seeing everything mentioned in this film. We got to perform many of the steps shown, including typing Linotype paper tapes. I particularly remember being taught how to fold a pressman's hat before we were allowed onto the press floor. The pressmen were still grumbling about the transition to soy-based inks: While they liked the result, the process was very trying, as only one press was switch over at a time, and didn't always go well. Their approach was to keep an "old-ink" press lightly loaded, so it could take the plates from a failed soy-ink press.
The automation was very impressive... until everything came to a screeching halt with hand-placing the elements on a page, pounding them solid, zinc, and molten lead! How the heck they could do all this in a few hours daily is astonishing.
I started working in the pre-press industry in 1999 and almost all of this technology was long gone; I did visit a customer 'down under' that still had a PDP-8 for page layout, there was 1 guy in the whole country who was able to keep the thing running (hope you're doing OK Mike!).
Reminds me of guided tours in the 70s at Le Soir and De Standaard newspapers when they were still produced in the centre of Brussels. Interestingly, the timing of those tours always ended with the printing presses churning out the late afternoon edition and being loaded into a fleet of vans bringing them to the news shops. 😃
00:58 S.F. BAY OIL SPILL "The 1971 San Francisco Bay oil spill occurred when two Standard Oil Company of California tankers, the Arizona Standard and the Oregon Standard, collided on January 18, 1971, in the San Francisco Bay. The resulting 800,000 gallon spill, the largest in Bay Area history.."
Great, throwback to my childhood, so wanted to deliver newspapers as a kid, they were the great kid job of the day. The big dailies in Chicago Tribune, and Daily News were the coveted gigs - never landed one of those - you could as the clip shows throw the papers while riding your bike. The smaller local papers wanted doorknob service - I had one of those jobs and I hated it.
Funny that you posted this just now - just a week ago, I had fallen down a deep rabbit hole of looking into the Linotype. (Fun fact: I almost rented an apartment in the carriage house of Ottmar Mergenthaler’s house in Baltimore!)
I worked as a graphic production artist and photo editing/composing tech for two separate major newspapers in a previous life. By the time I started working in the news business, the composing and paste-up processes in this film were long replaced by software (much of it Quark and Adobe) running on high-end Mac Pro and Windows machines. It was interesting work, but the stress of working to faster and faster deadlines, trying to please (fewer and fewer) difficult and demanding advertising clients - and the overall feeling that we had to somehow save an industry (the traditional print newspaper) that was dying before our very eyes due to the internet making information, opinion and advertising easier, faster and cheaper to produce and consume (I survived several rounds of layoffs at one paper and was hired by the other (as a temp) just after several rounds of layoffs there) - took its toll, and gradually I found myself out of the business, and I haven't really looked back.
My HS had a press room. A copy camera (my speciality) , and an offset printing press. We got the end rolls from the local newspaper office. Since I picked film plate work in late 77 , digital cameras just came out. I never went into the newspaper business.
"Different editions may be printed on different coloured paper." Now there's a good way of spotting the Scousers on this channel - who remembers the Pink Echo?
Even as late as 1971, newspapers had no clue of the coming impact of digital communications and citizen journalism. The cost-of-entry into the metropolitan newspaper business prevented all but the wealthiest citizens to enter. Why then let the voice of The People creep out of the Opinion page and into the news pages? Newspapers COULD have become the AOL source of digital news and information except for the arrogance that ink on paper would ALWAYS dominate. It was the dogged determination to maintain a high fixed overhead business model that led to failure. Long before paid circulation and advertising revenues fell to zero, the overhead costs resulted in unsustainable losses.
I delivered the paper last year (thanks Covid) and it's done in the middle of the night (2am) and the only people delivering are middle aged people. I'm guessing kids used to deliver the paper but I don't know any parent who would want their kid walking around with hundreds of papers in the middle of the night all by themselves. And the only way to make it worth it, is to take on more than one route. I had to deliver to around 150/160 homes and got paid 19 cents a paper. So it was just under $30 a night to spend three hours of my time dropping off papers to people. And I made the mistake of actually giving out my number to the subscribers. So I would get calls from people every damn day complaining they didn't get their paper when I know damn well I put it in their mail box and someone stole it. And then months after I quit, I still got calls from people saying they didn't get their paper. After a few months I did develop the most optimal route that took the least amount of time. It was a lot of thankless effort for no money. The paper's unwillingness to pay more than 2 cents for the flyers sure says a lot about the industry. They're right on the verge of collapsing.
I was a paperboy for the local newspaper in 1971 I had the largest route for that newspaper in my hometown 140 papers I hated Sundays and a lot of inserts thrown away by a lot of paper boys back then
What used to be called "Commercial Music" that was public domain and free to use for any kind of project decades later became copyrighted by people who did not create it. Bing!
@@FranLab Hmmm how do you copyright something you did not create?...something very wrong there with the system. Something also wrong with YT and their implementation of guilty, with little chance of defense and review. Also the next to no ramifications for false claims. YT needs to clean up its process.
@@FranLab any thoughts on uploading some of this stuff to the internet archive? UA-cam has a nice streamlined system, but it might be harder to BS around over there
Today, politicians tell their voters lies and the voters think it's gospel. The bias myth is just that -- promoted by the thieves who are doing the lying.
A lot of papers have shut down their own presses and farmed out the printing to papers in other cities. As an example, I'm in Kansas City and used to work for The Star. In 2006, the paper opened a two-block-long, $199 million press pavilion with a brand-new, state-of-the-art offset press. I was hired on as a page designer that fall, tasked with making the most of the paper's redesign and color printing abilities. We printed not only The Star, but also the regional editions of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Of course, the economy imploded shortly thereafter, and I was let go in the third round of layoffs in 2008. Fifteen years later, the owners of The Star sold the building, and the paper is now printed at The Des Moines Register's press and trucked down to Kansas City. The giant glass press pavilion in downtown Kansas City now sits dark and silent while the owners try to figure out how to turn it into something else.
This was a way way back look. Smoking a pipe? No gloves? I don't think I saw any CRTs either. I remember trying to get on the circulation dept. delivering on bike as a kid in 1980. Those banana seat bikes were phased out by heavily loaded warp speed station wagons peeling out at 6:00 A.M.. Ended up in subscriptions sales. Every time I get the social Security earnings report, the first line item was my paper past lol.
Wow. This film pretty much represents 50 years of my life until newspapers suddenly died, in 2008 for me. I've done every job shown in this film except for actually writing the news, from paperboy to photographer, to paste-up and pressman. When this film was made we were just converting from letterpress and hot type to offset and cold type. Very interesting piece of history Fran, thanks.
In the early 80's I was hired to help install a new phone system at the local newspaper. I got to see every nook and cranny of the facility. It was an incredible sight to see all of the machinery and people in action. Sadly, That facility is now closed and the newspaper is a mere shell of what is was. Unfortunately, the Internet has all but rendered the print edition obsolete. And the on-line stuff is so slanted one way or another that it is barely believable. I miss the great objective reporting as well as the people who staffed them. Great film Fran!
Thanks for the memories.
As a reporter, my first paper in the 1970s was still hot metal, and the whole five-story building shook when the presses rolled.
After that it was offset presses, IBM Selectrics and OCRs and Compugraphic typesetters before Apple and desktop publishing took over in the 1980s.
By the end of my career, I was doing about a dozen of the jobs you see performed in the film.
10 years from now 99% of this year's youtube videos won't be watched by anyone ever again. But these fantastic videos are the exceptions! TIMELESS GEMS! btw am I the only one who saw jack lalanne?
Nope! I spotted him-- like seeing an old friend. Why, he'd just perfected Dynamic Tension with those chairs in 71!
Hi Fran,
You have brought back great memories for me and I still have ink in my blood.
I am an ex-pressman for offset web newspaper printing presses. All Goss presses. (I was also a paperboy/then young man with a paper route for around 11 years. Never could dream that I would actually run a press...but as life worked out it unexpectedly happened.)
Had to give up on being a printer about 4 years ago...after oh...25+ some years... changing times and technology...the newspaper printing presses are now mostly gone at most newspapers except some of the big cities, but even some of these are gone. Farmed out to even competitors or commercial print shops. A lot of presses have been torn apart and scrapped at most newspapers. The printing numbers for distribution are at a sad state. The numbers left are extremely small for what was actually printed back in the days. And the number of pages not many... including a quite shrunken size of the paper. Just some comments...and some great but also sad memories. Thanks for this transfer to preserve some history of this and the others reels you have done.
And, try to get a job now in a horse-drawn carriage factory. Newspapers refused to see the change coming.
@@gotherecom I am not going to go into this with you...I have seen your other comment also.
Your horse comment can just go on and on with so many other things too...
Point of my comment ... was memories as a printer. All the different presses I ran for my area, nothing was newer than 1970 went it went live after press was erected. These presses were engineered to last.
Again just memories of someone who ran these things and the great people along the way.
I too was a Goss offset pressman. Have the bad hips and back to prove it! Lol
@@billybenson3834 Love the sound of the press speeding up after make-ready.
@@DaveNarn The sound of starting them up and getting up to full run speed is such a cool sound... forever burned in my brain... even though having to leave this "world". At one shop I was at the press actually shook the whole building...the front offices and all reporters areas included...
I graduated with a degree in print journalism in 2006, and my first job out of college was being a news page designer for The Kansas City Star. This film really makes me nostalgic for the days that I had the opportunity to work in the news. I remember going across the street to the presses and watching the giant machinery print and package the final product before I would grab a bundle of papers and take them back to the newsroom for the remaining designers and copy editors to review. I also worked at the Wisconsin State Journal in Madison, which has a Goss offset press very similar, if not identical, to the one shown in the film. Working at newspapers in the 21st century has given a lot of folks, myself included, PTSD from witnessing or experiencing the massive cutbacks and layoffs as finance vultures try to "trim the fat." But even though I haven't worked at a paper since 2014, I will never forget the sense of satisfaction and accomplishment I would have each night after working with a dedicated team with a passion for the craft and creating the best newspaper we could each and every day.
I worked as an advertising graphic production artist/designer for the major paper in Phoenix and as an editorial photo editing/composing tech in Houston. For about six (total) years of my life I lived through most of what you described, and also worked with dedicated and passionate newspaper people - many of whom got laid off. I left the Houston Chronicle in 2012; the building I worked in was torn down a couple of years later (and a 50-story skyscraper put in its place) as they moved all production to the former Houston Post facility.
Fran has a knack for finding the interesting stuff. What a priceless time capsule. Staggering amount of work and skill went into newspapers.
I'm always amazed at the speed of those presses - I bet there were a few nasty injuries, and a paper jam would get messy very quickly. As a kid I remember seeing the last of the presses running in Fleet St in London - papers came off conveyors which went straight into the trucks.
Hi, I am a recently ex-pressman. Yes, there have been nasty accidents at shops. Thankfully I have never seen the worst. I have known several pressman with some fingers and/or thumbs gone. I consider myself lucky... still have all...but did have some close calls... even though always aware of dangers... mistakes are made. On paper jams...it can be a nightmare at times... frustrating and you getting extremely dirty with ink also at times...raw ink does not just "wipe off" or "wash off" easily at all. And you are under pressure to get back up running...all print jobs are time sensitive!!!
Great film! Brings back memories of when I worked for a large news-gathering organization back in the late 70's, early 80's. I may be one of the youngest trained model 15 and 20 Teletype repair/rebuilding techs. Still were using them into the early 80's. Never experienced the letter-press production rooms, but plenty of big offset presses. And PDP-8s and 11s. Tho they had finally gone to terminals for editing. And RK-05 disc packs for storage.... Very interesting times. Learned a lot! Thanks for the memories! Stu
WOW! This is a trip on "the WayBack Machine" and a world that I was on the fringe of in '65 through '72 '. I'll spare others the details. It has indeed been a trip to remember. Thank you.
Nearly every kid in this film is riding a Schwinn Sting-Ray, the top selling bike of that time! I had mine in the Philly burbs too.
Wilmington Delaware represent!
Banana seat, me too.
Ha! The punch tape controlled Linotype machine is a post-WWII invention, but Monotype had the typesetting and casting processes separated and coupled by means of 31-channel punch tape (yes, that's right: a 31 bit parallel iterface!) with pneumatic readout (i.e. compressed air was passed through perforations, then directed to little cylinders with pistons that could rise and block the movement of tongs and levers, which was transferred to the position on a matrix case denoting the current matrix to cast from). Monotype cast pages of text line by line, character by character. Linotype / Intertype cast pages of text line by line, first putting the matrices together, then casting a lead slug, and finally distributing the matrices to the magazine using a mechanism that recognized the presence of one or more of 8 notches on the back side of the matrix. With one notch always present, there could be up to 128 combinations of them, which is very similar to (and might actually be the predecessor of) what we know as ASCII code :)
Back to the punch tape: there were transcoders from IBM style punch tape to Monotype 31-channel which was used even in the Monophoto phototypesetting machines. The company boasted ease of transition and interoperability between the old-style mechanical keyboards, modernized electronic keyboards, typesetting computers (they were around in the 1960s) and composition casters (hot-metal casting machines) or Monophoto filmsetters. There were like 5 generations of Monophoto, the initial two were based on the composition caster's construction, later ones were redeveloped. The company also developed the Lasercomp phototypesetting system that was revolutionary but didn't sell well as DTP was already around. Monotype stopped making machines in the '80s/'90s and moved into the digital type design.
BTW. etaoin shrdlu.
The optical, chemical and electromechanical technical challenges met are impressive. Not to mention the personnel and hierarchical structure of the copy production and assembly! Fascinating. The technology of any process done repeatedly at high volume is inevitably optimized and refined. How different is the electronic world we live in today.
Well, that was a blast fom my past :) When I left school in '76 I went straight into an apprenticeship printing newspapers (so I was a lithographic printer and platemaker). Since then I have done every job in newspapers. Copy writing, layout, journalism, photo-journalism, editorial, typesetting, sales, delivery and running my own local papers. It was great watching the newspaper printers running those enormous Goss machines.
Hahaha, that was Jack LaLanne in there. Amazing stuff Fran! These were the kinds of things I loved watching when I was a kid.
The look of the people, the clothing, office spaces -- I can hardly believe I was there in those days. Nothing like it exists anymore. And there never was and never will be again any place like the news biz!! Thanks for the memories!
You just have to be in awe of this process. And the team who filmed this. That liquid lead was intimidating. I imagine those plates are remelted. At 8:30, I swore I saw Jack LaLanne!
I agree that was a young Jack LaLanne
In the '90s I worked for a company that made computer-to-plate printing equipment: PostScript in one end, plates ready for the press out the other. The hard part turned out to be generating and managing enough input for their voracious appetites for data. Then making sure customers knew how to use their new toys. All just in time for the world to go digital, but that's another matter...
At end of school day, I used to walk from the bus stop to my home in East Side midtown Manhattan, past the presses of a daily newspaper. It was on 43rd St but I can't remember which paper it was. The loading docks were right there on the street. Hot and noisy as hell and the "printers devils" were always running around the end of the gigantic machines, just visible. One thing I'd like to point out are those neat little square white hats a lot of the pressmen are wearing in this movie. They are made fresh each day by the pressmen, out of scraps of newsprint. To keep the hot machine oil and ink out of their hair.
"rather than opinion, it's careful objectivity that counts for the dedicated staff reporters ... "
Oh, how times have changed.
Wow. Love the guy with the pipe and fun hair!
I worked pre-press for a newspaper.
The real money is in the press - printing as many outside jobs as possible for commercial customers.
Our in-house newspaper lost money due to lack of ad sales revenue and reduced circulation.
I went from hand past-up copy shot on stat-cameras to computer to plate machines made by Creo and Kodak.
One thing hasn’t changed.. you still live and die by the deadlines.
Love all the bottles of mucilage on the desks
I never got to see offset printing at large scale, but in the early 1990s, I was taught how to run an 11"x17" offset press in high school. By then we were creating everything in Aldus Pagemaker (pre-Adobe), then generating paper printing plates printed on a 1200 DPI 11x17 imagesetter-style laser printer. The paper plates would only last for shorter print runs before coming apart (maybe 1000 impressions?), but it was still neat to blend the two technologies together. With the press properly adjusted and on good paper, we could also use a much finer halftone screen than 85 LPI. Good times!
Each time you post one of these finely digitized films, I’m taken back to my grade school days - I can hear the hard soles of our teacher clackin down the long hall from the a/v room, and the projector had a certain sound too, in rolls the magic movie machine and the teachers pets would all scramble to help assist with the loading and focusing of the film we were about to see.
It was a special moment for me, as when the lights went out I felt at ease, because nobody could see me and for the short while the film was playing I felt at ease, knowing attention was drawn to the screen, and I felt less judged.
I also loved to view these old films, as a self proclaimed nerd I’ve had an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and information about the world we live in. This was as close to you tube as we had back then, and it’s a special treat I do t think most people truly understand the meaning of fully.
Thanks Fran we love you
My uncle was a reporter, worked his way to the Pulitzer the White House Press Corp, and bureau chief of the LA Times. On the other end, (and a far less glamorous) I started out as a paper boy, then to the newspaper plant itself. I worked in Distribution, where we took the papers off the presses, ads were inserted then bundled for the carriers. Only one time did I ever hit the red Stop The Presses button (and you’d better have a damn good reason) for seeing a huge typo on the front page. A small local paper with a daily circulation of about 55k.
We can't even watch a special interest film from 1971 without some copyright troll making sure that the music is never ever heard again no matter the context ? Sounds about right. And they say we aren't regressing.
I am loving your film archives, and am hoping you keep this great content coming! Best wishes to you!
I feel ancient. I barely can believe I was born that year! I'm perfectly happy with my smartphone 😸 I was always looking forward for things we watched in sci fi movies. It's difficult for people younger than me to believe how analog life was until recently in many countries. Great video, thanks for sharing!
When I was a kid in the '80s, sometimes my folks would ask our local paper for some offset plates they were done with. Made good sheet-metal for projects
Amazing how much work went into creating newspapers!
16:16 Digital PDP-8/1
I just can't get over that music.
Fascinating. I spotted Jack Lalane in the ad department! Too bad newspapers are a dying breed anymore.
When they said some of the printing was arranged by digital computer, and they showed a Digital (TM) PDP 8/1. It was a digital computer and a Digital (Equipment Corporation) computer! (Any other former DECies watch this channel?) A good thing about working on computers is you get to visit all kinds of companies, and I visited a newspaper (I think the Los Angeles Times) right after the Northridge Earthquake in the early 1990s (I worked for Digital Equipment in the VAX / Alpha days), and wondered, in the press room, how many times the word "earthquake" was flying past my head every minute!
Fran, you DO have a way of finding the most interesting stuff! :O ~Cindy! :)
The sheer amount of linotype, ink and newsprint consumed every day in almost every town and city is mind boggling.
Staff from reporters and editors, art department, typesetters , pressmen to distribution and even kids with a newspaper route are featured here.
All the workers that made and serviced those presses.Who produced those telephones, typewriters, teletypes, cameras and plate machines.
Without fail the news got off the press and delivered to your door 7/365.
10:28 Series of dots. Today they call them "pixels"; such a digital term.
Great film and great transfer to digital. Thanks again Fran.
This is why you are super Fran...Thanks
Recycled lead printing plate uses: primarily for us (kids) to remelt used, cut up plates to pour into molds to make fishing sinkers. Let's see, mid to late 60's era before the Elmira NY Gazette switched over to offset printing.
I was an offset pressman, but I worked with a lot of former "lead slingers" who became offset pressman when the press technology changed. Every one of them were fishermen also...yes sinkers made by them at work. Every shop I was at still had sinker molds still around even though the lead and those types of printing presses were gone. You made me smile here... 🙂
Another fabulous transfer. And your solution for the music "issue" was brilliant. Can't believe how solid the frame is, no gate chatter like when I used to project these things in the high school cafeteria. This is a wonderful series you're doing. Glad you held on to them.
Love the groovy backwards music in the intro.
This video was amazing to watch and realize what they had for state of the art at the time. Saw a glimpse of a PDP8 in there even.
Great video!!
Fascinating film, the early "hot metal" run gave birth to "hot of the press" expression.
Prioritize objectively. How refreshing.
Back in the 80s I had the opportunity to buy a Linotype machine that was being scrapped by a local newspaper. I alternate between deep sadness that I didn't take it and happiness that I dodged being saddled with a bulky money pit.
Thanks Fran, Loving theses videos! Please keep em coming!
Great film Fran, brilliant transition to digital 👏.
Thanks for sharing.
So many types of specialised hardware.
Nice color adjustment. 😊
If you listen carefully, the intro and outro music is a track played in reverse…telling you “buy the paper, buy the paper” ;)
16:17 The guy with the smoking pipe 😂 I was born in 1971. I remember in 1979 when smoking on commercial airlines was still allowed. The plane was separated by smokers and non-smokers sections. I just don't understand what the airlines did if they had a high demand for one particular choice. Would the seats go empty?
As for the newspaper boys at the end, I was a paperboy from 7th grade to 8th grade back in 1985-86. I couldn't believe the Northwest Herald was paying to through newspapers to people. I used to make it a game. I was trying to hit the target, right on the welcome mat or trying to beat my delivery time.
I got a little taste of working with punched tape readers and punchers just as their last remaining use seemed to be happening with machine tool controls (late 80s-early 90s), but I never realized it was used in newspaper production. Very interesting
Wow, does this bring back memories! I remember a day-long field trip in in 8th grade (1970) spent touring our local paper and seeing everything mentioned in this film. We got to perform many of the steps shown, including typing Linotype paper tapes. I particularly remember being taught how to fold a pressman's hat before we were allowed onto the press floor. The pressmen were still grumbling about the transition to soy-based inks: While they liked the result, the process was very trying, as only one press was switch over at a time, and didn't always go well. Their approach was to keep an "old-ink" press lightly loaded, so it could take the plates from a failed soy-ink press.
The automation was very impressive... until everything came to a screeching halt with hand-placing the elements on a page, pounding them solid, zinc, and molten lead! How the heck they could do all this in a few hours daily is astonishing.
I started working in the pre-press industry in 1999 and almost all of this technology was long gone; I did visit a customer 'down under' that still had a PDP-8 for page layout, there was 1 guy in the whole country who was able to keep the thing running (hope you're doing OK Mike!).
Absolutely fascinating
Reminds me of guided tours in the 70s at Le Soir and De Standaard newspapers when they were still produced in the centre of Brussels. Interestingly, the timing of those tours always ended with the printing presses churning out the late afternoon edition and being loaded into a fleet of vans bringing them to the news shops. 😃
18:09 That's some clever and amazingly simple cable management on that reciprocating motorized brush.
2:55 VW Beetle Mates with Tree
8:24 Looks like Jack Lalanne!
I am a printer...Great video Fran ;-).....back then it was legal to smoke on the job :-).
The use of a T-square, every day of the work week. Oh, how times have changed.
It's really great film. Thank you very much indeed.
00:58 S.F. BAY OIL SPILL "The 1971 San Francisco Bay oil spill occurred when two Standard Oil Company of California tankers, the Arizona Standard and the Oregon Standard, collided on January 18, 1971, in the San Francisco Bay. The resulting 800,000 gallon spill, the largest in Bay Area history.."
Great, throwback to my childhood, so wanted to deliver newspapers as a kid, they were the great kid job of the day. The big dailies in Chicago Tribune, and Daily News were the coveted gigs - never landed one of those - you could as the clip shows throw the papers while riding your bike. The smaller local papers wanted doorknob service - I had one of those jobs and I hated it.
That outro music being reversed gives it a very "Four-tet" feel - it's great :)
yess, we had a tour through the phila inquirer back in the mid 60's ...
Funny that you posted this just now - just a week ago, I had fallen down a deep rabbit hole of looking into the Linotype. (Fun fact: I almost rented an apartment in the carriage house of Ottmar Mergenthaler’s house in Baltimore!)
I worked as a graphic production artist and photo editing/composing tech for two separate major newspapers in a previous life. By the time I started working in the news business, the composing and paste-up processes in this film were long replaced by software (much of it Quark and Adobe) running on high-end Mac Pro and Windows machines. It was interesting work, but the stress of working to faster and faster deadlines, trying to please (fewer and fewer) difficult and demanding advertising clients - and the overall feeling that we had to somehow save an industry (the traditional print newspaper) that was dying before our very eyes due to the internet making information, opinion and advertising easier, faster and cheaper to produce and consume (I survived several rounds of layoffs at one paper and was hired by the other (as a temp) just after several rounds of layoffs there) - took its toll, and gradually I found myself out of the business, and I haven't really looked back.
Perfectly made documentary.
amazing video!
Jack Lalanne....💪👍
I know. Knocked me out! Same body too!
So much work ! Impressive !
I never realizes how insanely dangerous this was! Nixie alert at 8:32. Thanks for sharing.
My HS had a press room. A copy camera (my speciality) , and an offset printing press. We got the end rolls from the local newspaper office. Since I picked film plate work in late 77 , digital cameras just came out. I never went into the newspaper business.
"Different editions may be printed on different coloured paper."
Now there's a good way of spotting the Scousers on this channel - who remembers the Pink Echo?
The ,"Pink'un"
Green final edition?
Even as late as 1971, newspapers had no clue of the coming impact of digital communications and citizen journalism. The cost-of-entry into the metropolitan newspaper business prevented all but the wealthiest citizens to enter. Why then let the voice of The People creep out of the Opinion page and into the news pages? Newspapers COULD have become the AOL source of digital news and information except for the arrogance that ink on paper would ALWAYS dominate. It was the dogged determination to maintain a high fixed overhead business model that led to failure. Long before paid circulation and advertising revenues fell to zero, the overhead costs resulted in unsustainable losses.
This brought back the smell of the newspapers back then. It was an oily smell mixed in with the smell of the paper.
I delivered the paper last year (thanks Covid) and it's done in the middle of the night (2am) and the only people delivering are middle aged people. I'm guessing kids used to deliver the paper but I don't know any parent who would want their kid walking around with hundreds of papers in the middle of the night all by themselves.
And the only way to make it worth it, is to take on more than one route. I had to deliver to around 150/160 homes and got paid 19 cents a paper. So it was just under $30 a night to spend three hours of my time dropping off papers to people. And I made the mistake of actually giving out my number to the subscribers. So I would get calls from people every damn day complaining they didn't get their paper when I know damn well I put it in their mail box and someone stole it. And then months after I quit, I still got calls from people saying they didn't get their paper.
After a few months I did develop the most optimal route that took the least amount of time. It was a lot of thankless effort for no money. The paper's unwillingness to pay more than 2 cents for the flyers sure says a lot about the industry. They're right on the verge of collapsing.
There were quite a few jobs and procedures that don't exist anymore.
When I heard the backward music, at first I thought they were brave enough to use it these times...
I hear you, Fran
I was a paperboy for the local newspaper in 1971 I had the largest route for that newspaper in my hometown 140 papers I hated Sundays and a lot of inserts thrown away by a lot of paper boys back then
It is facinating how dirty, dark and loud industrial facilitys used to be.
I didn't get the dirty or dark, just the loud. Liquid lead caught my eye, though.
No digital ink stains on your hands from reading the news any more.
This film calls out so much that is wrong with news today.
Sort of expected to hear the theme music from " Kolchak: The Night Stalker"...
Love this video! Was wondering why the music was reversed but understand now...
What used to be called "Commercial Music" that was public domain and free to use for any kind of project decades later became copyrighted by people who did not create it. Bing!
@@FranLab Hmmm how do you copyright something you did not create?...something very wrong there with the system. Something also wrong with YT and their implementation of guilty, with little chance of defense and review. Also the next to no ramifications for false claims. YT needs to clean up its process.
@@FranLab any thoughts on uploading some of this stuff to the internet archive? UA-cam has a nice streamlined system, but it might be harder to BS around over there
Oh, I thought the reversed music track was just a cool expressive 70s way as intended on the film. :)
Best Yet Fran. Thanks. Q from a brit who never got their papers delivered that way, how do the kids on cycles know who or who didn't subscribe?
I can't tell you how many carbon rods I changed on the ol' Flip-Top platemaker back in the day!
Remember when careful objectivity was a news thing?
Before journalists became activists. And they have the gall to ask why people don't respect them anymore.
Who would you consider and activist journalist ?
One step forward, two steps backward.
Today, politicians tell their voters lies and the voters think it's gospel.
The bias myth is just that -- promoted by the thieves who are doing the lying.
Umm, read some old papers. They weren’t anywhere near as objective as people think. Nor are modern papers as biased as people think.
I love the PDP 11
PDP-8 (even better)
Those shirts and ties... oh, those shirts and ties... "Doctor, my eyes have seen the years..."
20:20 This reminds me of the 1980s Atari game Paperboy and its followups. Gotta work like mad to get it out there to the readers!
I thought I saw Marty McFly's house there at the end of the film with the kids in the garage. Looked like it in the movie 'Back to the Future'.
Wow. Where are those printing presses and big machines today?
No longer needed. Printing can be done on a much smaller scale. You can see some of the HUGE buildings still around in some of the big cities.
A lot of papers have shut down their own presses and farmed out the printing to papers in other cities. As an example, I'm in Kansas City and used to work for The Star. In 2006, the paper opened a two-block-long, $199 million press pavilion with a brand-new, state-of-the-art offset press. I was hired on as a page designer that fall, tasked with making the most of the paper's redesign and color printing abilities. We printed not only The Star, but also the regional editions of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.
Of course, the economy imploded shortly thereafter, and I was let go in the third round of layoffs in 2008. Fifteen years later, the owners of The Star sold the building, and the paper is now printed at The Des Moines Register's press and trucked down to Kansas City. The giant glass press pavilion in downtown Kansas City now sits dark and silent while the owners try to figure out how to turn it into something else.
hard to believe this is already 50 years ago
This was a way way back look. Smoking a pipe? No gloves? I don't think I saw any CRTs either. I remember trying to get on the circulation dept. delivering on bike as a kid in 1980. Those banana seat bikes were phased out by heavily loaded warp speed station wagons peeling out at 6:00 A.M.. Ended up in subscriptions sales. Every time I get the social Security earnings report, the first line item was my paper past lol.