Saratoga News

Columns

Point of View

Newspaper shut down for a day ... and the future?

By Carl Heintze

Sometime in the 1960s, a low-flying Navy plane clipped a power line in Niles Canyon, shutting down the electricity in part of downtown San Jose.

The pilot wasn't hurt, and the plane landed safely, but unfortunately for the San Jose Mercury and the San Jose News, the line led by some odd circumstance directly to the newspaper plant, then on Santa Clara Street near Almaden Avenue.

And even more unfortunately, the Mercury and News had no emergency generator.

As a result, for most of a day the plant was without electricity, all the pots of molten "lead" on the lineotype machines turned cold and hardened. No type could be set, the presses would not run and the lights went out and stayed out.

No newspaper came out that day.

I dredge this story up for a few reasons. First, it is a symbol of my time in the newspaper business, the era of hot type; secondly, because it's the only instance I can think of--except for a four-month newspaper strike in 1959--when no newspaper was delivered to San Jose households; and because today the prospects for daily newspapers look almost as bleak as that afternoon.

There may yet come a time when no daily newspaper is printed in San Jose simply because there will no longer be a daily newspaper. It's a phenomenon that is happening all over the country. Newspapers are shrinking in size, staff and circulation.

Today is, in fact, a bad time to be in the newspaper business. The days of hot type were, in contrast, in many ways a good time to be a newspaper reporter, editor or copyreader. Although we worked with mechanical typewriters, used heavy carbon pencils and didn't make a lot of money, we did have a good time.

Daily we came to work with one object in mind: to find any news there might be in San Jose, to gather it together and to get it printed, out the door and in subscribers' driveways, that night or certainly by the next morning.

We were challenged to meet this goal because in those days newspapers were almost the only way in which most people got their news.

And perhaps almost as importantly it also was the chief method of advertising to the local population.

The classified section was huge and what's called display advertising was, too. For a while the two papers were known as the Sears and Roebuck catalogs of American newspapers. While this was not entirely a compliment, it did emphasize the papers' ability to make money.

Television was still in its infancy, still was black and white and still was grappling with a lot of mechanical problems in getting out news rapidly and with depth.

Even so, we worked in what would today seem like primitive conditions. All the news department, sports, editorial and what was then known as the "women's" department were housed in one single large, very noisy room. We called it, not without reason, the newsroom. It was where the paper was born each day and where it was put to bed each night.

By today's standards, it was a dingy, gloomy tomb. We had ancient, small desks, grumpy printers and no cafeteria. We yelled at one another because of the noise. Copy went to "the back shop" (the composing room and printing department) by a primitive pneumatic tube system that broke down with regularity. Now and then the printers would send back things like dead mice through its tubes. But then practical jokes were an important part of work. We played them on one another all the time.

The confinement and the hardships somehow made us companions on a daily voyage of discovery that no longer seems to be prevalent.

We worked either by direct contact with our sources or on the telephone. Tape recorders were unknown (we used pencils and folds of news print to make notes), television reporters were considered something of a joke and there existed a spirit in the "pencil" press, as we called it, which (and I use the word advisedly) made us seem like comrades.

Newspapers were mostly printed words, not printed pictures. The number of stories in a newspaper far exceeded that in today's dailies, and our emphasis was telling the story as simply and directly as possible, not with the "feature" style of today that makes the reader struggle to find the facts.

Those of us who are left and who still remember those days seem like comrades. Now and then we gather to relish "the good old days," whether they were all that good or not, remembering the sense of belonging to something that no longer exists and that seems to slip ever more rapidly into the past.

Perhaps it's too early to write an obituary for American newspapers. But it is not too early to wish that some of the esprit that filled those days might return to those who are still struggling to keep newspapers alive.