Sunday, April 20, 2008

An era passes ...

... Last night at Wapping.

"I'm reminded of the very first leader I wrote for that first Wapping issue, dated January 27, 1986. It looked just like this blog. Not because we had suddenly changed our leader style along with our home. ... But because the writer, this writer, had not been concentrating during his computer tuition. That night was the first on which Times journalists had input their copy without the intervention of printers. And some of us were quicker to pick up the art than others."

1 comment:

  1. Anonymous3:30 PM

    I remember Wapping, too. At that time I used to decamp to our local typesetters to pass the news pages every monday night. It was all very exciting -- the "newspaper" part of Nature. (The formal scientific papers were, and are, handled by technical typesetters a week earlier, then in Bristol, now in China.)
    When Wapping happened, the typesetters we worked with were pleased. They did not like the hold that the old unions had over the newspaper industry any more than anyone else did.
    Me, I noticed immediately that word-break discipline was out of the window. Sigh. I remember those days poring over galleys making sure words broke in the most logical place for the reader - and having long debates about it at 3 a.m. I think I am quite glad those days are over, though I do still wince at what computers consider to be appropriate word breaks. (eg the "ly" part of adverbs.)

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