Two decades past--and still dying

Here’s David Callaway of MarketWatch recalling his 20 years in a dying industry:

Back in 1987, it was widely assumed that newspapers were dying. The post-Watergate rush to become a reporter was over. Circulations were down. And new technologies were threatening. At one point, the hot new thing was to deliver news by fax machine, and papers were going to die because readers would be able to get news quicker by fax. They would even be able to tailor the type of news they wanted to receive. Imagine that?

In my section of the paper, which we affectionately called FIN for "financial," we kept abreast of the market's movement with an old Dow Jones news ticker, which clacked out spools of dark blue, inky copy all day long, and market updates once an hour. You had to get up from your desk, where primitive word processors had been installed only a year before, and walk over to the ticker, which was close to a blood stain on the aging carpet that newsroom legend held had been there ever since a printer coughed up a lung two decades before that. It was right out of The Front Page.

I'm told the rug has been cleaned. But 20 years later The Herald is still there, breaking news and still providing a daily slap upside the head to its larger, more comfortable rival, The Boston Globe. In the meantime, the industry has morphed completely.

Click on the headline to read all of Callaway’s story.