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 I was hanging out in our newspaper morgue the other day, working on 2010 contest entries when I got distracted and started paging through some of our publication’s really old issues.
Just about everyone knows how valuable a newspaper’s back-issues are when it comes to archiving a community’s history. Quite regularly, we all have visitors come in, asking if they can look through old issues in pursuit of research data.
When that happens, almost without fail these visitors end up spending a lot more time at this task than they’d budgeted, simply because they become side-tracked as their eyes fall on other tidbits of history.
But these trips down memory lane don’t just happen to our readers. Even newspaper folks themselves occasionally fall victim to this benign affliction.
Like me.
That day, as I combed through old issues, I happened upon a May 9, 1896, copy of the Fredericksburg Standard’s predecessor — the Gillespie County News.
It really wasn’t so much the news-of-the-day that caught my attention as did the more physical aspects of the publica-tion itself.
For example, on the front page of that 113-year-old copy there was only one article, and it was just the continuation of a serialized feature begun the week before.
All the other space, aside from the nameplate, was taken up with advertisements — 12 of them, in fact — including two competing baking powder ads that captured the top-right and lower-right corners of the page. There was also a top-center promo for Ayer’s Sarsaparilla which claimed to cure cancer. (So much for truth in advertising.)
The whole experience of look-ing through those back-issues got me to thinking about how much newspaper production has changed over the years — some for the better and maybe in some cases not so much.
As I moved on to subsequent volumes and into the early years of the Standard (the News’ successor starting in 1907), I noticed some other physical characteristics that distinguished those old publications from what we produce today.
For one thing, the pages were ginormous in size. Compared to many newspapers today that are printed on a 22-inch web, those old rolls at one point measured as much as 35 inches wide.
But, on the other hand, the technology was such back then that there were no photographs. Later on, engravings did occur, but they weren’t local — just national or international in nature.
Over time — in the Standard’s case around 1936 — the front-page ads disappeared, retreating inside to where most editorial room purists figure they always belonged anyway.
Another aspect that changed was the size of headlines. Not until the mid-1930s did it apparently occur to anyone around our office that you could make them more than one column wide. Before then, the makeup man could load umpteen stories on page one, wrapping them up and down the page to form a vast sea of gray.
Front-page coverage back then tended to have a wide range of topics. Those old layouts did display the traditional communitywide stories about meetings, civic functions, farm news and the like. But they also made room for the incidental, like who was visiting from out of town, where the weekend garden socials took place and similar other big doings.
Around 1938, the Standard started printing locally-produced photos — something that then-managing editor and eventual-publisher Art Kowert always particularly valued.
Over time, our paper — like just about everyone else in this business — got better at making its product more eye-friendly, thanks to improvements both in readability and appearance through the miracles of offset printing. In the process, we made headlines bigger, columns wider, layouts more modular and photos larger and more creative in their content.
In fact, it seems like only yesterday that just about all of us with ink in our veins adopted SAU widths, dumped column rules and started using lots of photos.
Those were the good old days.
Unfortunately, a lot of us have lately had to make some tough decisions, mostly due to economic challenges. Page sizes have, in many cases, became smaller; we’ve tended to reduce the width and sometimes the number of columns, and newsprint is not as thick as it once was.
Against these new demands, here in Fredericksburg we’ve been trying to hang on to our 27-inch web and a six-column format, partly in deference to our collective readership’s aging eyes and — perhaps naively — to counter what seems to be a misguided notion among some folks that newspapers must truly be in trouble because their pages are getting smaller, thinner and fewer in number.
Even so, all of us are doing what we can to better serve and survive in good health.
Aside from software improvements like pagination, digital color photography and the like, here in our part of the publishing world, we’ve tried to boost our efforts in news dissemination by implementing programs like home delivery and a complete online presence.
Still, I know there’s room to grow and to learn a thing or two from friends in this business who have been particularly adventurous in new approaches to reaching readers — like blogging, twittering, doing streaming videos and putting ads on the front page.
Ads on the front page? Now there’s a novel idea.
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