Old school journalism

Here are a few old school journalism things I hope our younger photojournalist find interesting or at least entertaining. There are printing processes, equipment and journalism terms that are no longer used while some are still among us but in different ways. I believe we need to know a little about where we came from in this unique profession.

Burn and Dodge

If you are a user of Adobe Photoshop you know about the “burn” and “dodge” tools. The burn tool, with an icon that looks like a hand giving the “A-OK,” darkens an area on a photo. The dodge tool, with an icon that looks like a lollypop, lightens an area. These are taken from dark room lab photo developing where light is shown through a negative onto photo-sensitive paper for a precise time to create the photo.

In days of yore, when a person in a photo lab wanted to lighten an area of a photo they held a little round piece of cardboard on a stick (the “lollypop”) and waved it over the developing paper, creating a momentary shadow and making that area lighter. If they wanted an area darker they would cup their hand leaving only a hole for a spot of light to get through (the “A-OK sign”) and the extra light would darken that particular area. It is cool that Adobe resurrected these terms when developing their famous photo manipulating software.

I never did dark room work and a predecessor of Photoshop was around when I got into journalism professionally, but printing was almost like Benjamin Franklin days when I was first learning journalism in high school.

Typesetting

My high school journalism by-line.

The term “typesetting” is used today when the appearance of a magazine, pamphlet, website page or newspaper is improved using various fonts, colors, type sizes, lines and photo placement. Typesetting, however, was a physical process of placing metal type by hand one line at a time. When I got into journalism in 1973 as a freshman in high school (Yes, Jennifer Retter, respected reporter and Ninja Journalism contributor, humans did walk the Earth back then), typesetting was already “modern” with a big machine called a Linotype. In journalism class, we typed our stories on a typewriter and made corrections and notations on the sheets of paper for the typesetter at the print shop. Such notations were to bold a word, enlarge headlines, make paragraph indentions and any corrections because there were no font selections and no spell checker on a typewriter.

The typesetter at the print shop re-typed the stories on the Linotype and metal letters and spaces fell from the type feeder snugly into a frame the size of the page. It was in this manner that a page was built and later “pressed” onto paper. Used type was melted down to be cast into new type. In another process, chemicals burned photo negatives onto metal and were placed in the frame to be part of the page. My journalism class took a field trip each year to the print shop to see this amazing machine and when I graduated my instructor gave me my “by-line” in metal type.

-15-

The term “15” and “30” are way old and few probably know about them. When typing a story to be sent to the print shop, every page had “-15-“ at the bottom if the story was continued on the following sheet and “-30-“ if it was the end. Even my old journalism teacher did not know how that came about as the way to signify to the typesetter when the story ended.

Feet Font

I can’t finish today without telling you why we use serif fonts. Serif means “feet” >and serif fonts looks like this< with slightly larger tips on the letters. This was used in those days of metal type and these tips on the letters insured the type would not wear down before the press was finished. We continue to use serif today as well as sans serif (“no feet”) because we are used to serif fonts like Times Roman and Century and find them easier to read in a body of text.

Here it is larger for you to see the little tips:

Serif Font, Sans Serif Font

You can watch a Linotype in action here.

I would love to read and share more journalism memories, old or new, from Ninja Journalism fans. Email me here.