Right in the centre - History and experience
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- Published on Thursday, September 3, 2015
By Ken Waddell
The Neepawa Banner
As we approach the completion of our 26th year of publication, it’s interesting to ponder some of the changes that have taken place in the newspaper business. Much has changed but much has not. Some things will never change.
The thing that will never change is that a local newspaper can be popular and successful if it actually carries news. Many people bemoan the demise of the newspaper industry, there is no doubt that there has been some declines. In some places, the declines have been accompanied by companies cutting news content. Even when the actual volume of news may not have gone down, the wrong kind of news has been kept on the pages. Local newspaper readers really only care about local content. The big daily papers can cover the world, provincial or federal events. The local paper needs to cover the local stuff. Some papers do it very well, some don’t. We try to to keep it local.
We try not to fill our pages with stuff you could read a dozen different places, be it on line or in print. Local is good, that’s why it’s called the local paper.
There have been many technical changes in the past 26 years. When we started, a computer was a dull beige plastic box with a black and white 8 inch screen that cost twice as much as a computer does today. The first Apple MacPlus cost us $2400, the printer about the same and a scanner was a luxury we could only dream about. Now our phones have many times the power of the MacPlus. If you really want to see a MacPlus, we have the original up on a shelf in our front office at Neepawa. I can still remember the day we got our first digital camera. It was an Olympus 600. We still have it on display. It was a really neat camera, it looked good, was light and felt good. We were among the very first community newspapers to use digital photography. The dark room door closed shortly after that and was never used again. Now dark rooms are museum pieces and the technology is something you have to look up on the internet.
We used to have big, long tables and a light table to lay out the pages. It was a neat experience to see the weekly news and advertising pages grow into existence by actually cutting and pasting pieces of paper together to make a page. Gone are the lay-out tables, the waxer, the tiny laser printers. All replaced by electronic technology that makes for a quicker, cleaner and hopefully easier-to-read page.
The new technology has its pitfalls. As we work our way through the generations of staff, we have to keep reminding ourselves that we are dealing with ink on newsprint. While all our news stories, our pictures and our ads are built on a computer screen, that’s not what the reader sees. What the reader sees is a newsprint product with black and white or colour images that hopefully look good, but different than they did on the screen. An ad may look really attractive, it may really “pop” on a screen with lots of coloured background and neat fonts. In print it may be not so good. We still have to remember that white space is part of the reading experience. In fact, a full page of print has more white space on it than black ink. It has to be that way so it’s readable. As we move through the generations, the younger staff have never had the non-computer experience. The computer image will change in quality and clarity as it moves from screen to print and we have to be very aware of that only experience will bridge that gap.
On the lighter side, I have a favourite joke about experience. Seems that an old bank president was retiring. It so happens that a young, eager banker was just starting, new on the job that same day. At the old banker’s retirement party, after all the speeches made and niceties had been exchanged, the young fella sidled up to the retiree and asked, ”Sir, I understand you have been very successful. What do you attribute your success to?” The older man said, “Two words my son, good decisions.”
“How do you make good decisions?” said asked the young man.”
One word, my son, experience.”
“How do you get experience, sir?
The old man looked sincerely at the young man and said, “Two words my son, bad decisions.”
That’s my stories about experience for this week.
