Tom Moore with teletype machines that must be in a museum somewhere today

When the sound of teletypes let you know you were in a newsroom

BJ newsroom retiree Tom Moore takes us back to The Land of Long, Long Ago when the BJ copy desk got its state and world news from teletype machines, which clacked out information like some phantom typist.

Posts Tom:

“Here's how we used to get all the news .. the wire room of the Akron Beacon Journal .. the real window on the world at that time.”

We’re talking a LONG time ago, since the BJ began receiving its wire news via computers in the 1970s. That’s four decades!

Someone had to tear off the paper for each story and put them on spikes of various categories and priorities. When the copy editor read the story, he would cross out unwanted words and paragraphs, maybe even cut and paste in new information between paragraphs. Glue was critical.

When you heard a lot of bells dinging on the teletype you knew something urgent was printing out. I worked at the Dayton Daily News when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. The bells rang incessantly that day.

Sports and Business departments had their specialty teletypes to clack on information for their topics.

I succeeded Pat Englehart as newsroom electronics coordinator and trained the first person in the newsroom on the first terminal in the newsroom, starting with the Sunday Department where Larry Bloom and Bill Bierman worked, in the late 1970s.

The teletype machines went the way of Composing’s linotype machines. And progress moved on to wipe out other equipment.

The newsroom was a loud, bustling place in those days. 

Now the BJ has about one-fourth the humans than it did when the teletypes clacked and ding-dinged away. 

Silence, in this case, is not golden.