alt Hacker NewsI like to read a physical dirty (ink dust, not content) finger newspapers whenever I can get them. At a bakery / cafe a few weeks ago, sitting outside having cherry Danish and an Americano (the international special), I was reading the NYT and the SeaTimes section by section. It was awesome. Comics, international, regional beats, magazines. I realized somewhere in the middle of the caffeine and sugar rush, just what a huge effort it takes to put out a DAILY newspaper. It's incedible, even without considering the cheap price.
There was a couple nearby looking at the mess of papers on my table. I realized I needed to tidy my donnage pile of sections, and impulsively offered them to the couple. They almost jumped. If I didn't know better I swear they were living out some fantasy of holding a newspaper for the first time.
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same here! Also for Airports, trains etc... sometimes I even buy one, which is often around 6 - 7 bucks, esp. weekend issues
(haha, 6 - 7 bucks for a printed mag on paper - seems somehow surreal these days? Esp since its "a one day useable product" mainly, while you can get some of these news app subscriptions for 10 bucks and you get every stuff tons of stuff)
I had this feeling recently at a local fair when a local online-only news site produced thier first-ever physical edition. It was great, I read through the entire thing while waiting for the parade.
> I realized somewhere in the middle of the caffeine and sugar rush, just what a huge effort it takes to put out a DAILY newspaper. It's incredible, even without considering the cheap price.
Former newspaper editor here. We took it for granted at the time, but the orchestration of different teams on a daily basis, with all kinds of cascading workflows and triggers, was something to behold. Editorial, design, special sections, ads, production, printing ... plus all of the smaller teams (copy desk, sports, etc.) and ad-hoc collaborations for instance involving a special event or major news story.
You'd go home late (or more often than not in those days, to the bar) feeling good about what your team had just shipped and looking forward to getting the hard copy early the next morning (sometimes when leaving said bar!). And then you'd start all over again around 11 am. It was far more intense than magazine or book publishing, which I got into later.
And this was in the 90s. Technology was making things faster, but there were still a lot of older analog systems in place including photography darkrooms. Once I even had to call in a breaking late story over a pay phone, dictating it to the editor on duty. Laptops were rare and expensive, and even the people who used them typically saved to a floppy which would be brought in to the newsroom later to be edited.
We had primitive terminal-based word processors (we called it "CText" but I can't locate any reference to it now) and I got started just as Quark Xpress entered the design workflow, replacing xacto knives and bits of paper and opaque plastic that was somehow imaged and sent to the printers. If you went back 30 years earlier, they were still using linotype.