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| 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.
