Nuts and bolts of news reporting -- “good old” days

I started writing news stories with a ream of copy paper, my old Underwood typewriter, and the telephone.

That telephone made it the cat’s meeyow. For “red hot” stories, such as a fire or accident that need to be published the next day, I would type the stories on the copy paper and then call the paper, the Bangor Daily News. A hotshot fast-fingered typist would get on the phone and type the tale as I read it to him.

I was a teacher in the days when teachers really didn’t make much. For some reason, I picked the BDN and drove up there one spring day in search of a job to give us more money over the summer -- job as in janitor, driving a truck full of newspapers to be delivered somewhere.

Don’t know how this happened, but I ended up talking with Kent Ward. Ward assured me there were no “jobs” and asked me if I wanted to write.

Write? I’d been writing. Selling or not selling short stories I wrote to help my lagging eighth graders improve their reading skills. Write? Ward must have seen me coming. I was ready to write.*

He explained the job of “stringer,” which, in case you don’t know, had nothing to do with string. A stringer was a local correspondent, who was paid by the inch for stories he turned in and were published. This was not a day job but was what a stringer did when not at the day job.

Ward gave me a pile of rough copy paper and some postage-paid envelopes to mail those “hot” tales from Swanville and nearby places in to the paper.

“I’m a reporter!” I may have shouted when I got home, although I probably didn’t as I wasn’t much of a shouter.

Besides, I had gone seeking a job, you know, with hours and a regular paycheck and had come home with a pile of copy paper.

At the time, I was on the Swanville Planning Board. This was one of the first groups of planning boards to tackle the brand-new issue of shoreland zoning. So, of course, I wrote about our meetings and our successful bid to have the townspeople vote in our shoreland zoning ordinance.

Looking back, writing about the planning board was probably a conflict of interest. I didn’t know much about the conflict part, but I had the interest. I’d always wanted to write and had done so when I could.

I’d type those stories, tuck them into the postage-paid envelope, and presto, my stories -- mine! -- were on the way to appearing in print.

The trick was to avoid typos. Now as any writer of yesteryear knows, the typo came at the last word of the final line at the bottom of the page. That way, you could either erase -- or “whiteout” it with that little bottle of stuff that did just that -- the type, leaving a messy looking page. Or, you would retype the entire page, often to have the typo reassert itself in exactly the same place. I love the “good now days” of writing, where you just delete that word with no mess.

I recall doing two or three stories of fires, which were “hot” enough to phone in to old Hot Fingers. One day Hot Fingers said to me over the phone, “We appreciate these quick fire stories. I just hope you’re not setting them to have something to write about.” (Or words to that effect, having been spoken to me in the 1970s.)

I did that as long as I taught at what was then Mount View Junior High. Teaching moved me on, dislocated us, and next thing I knew I was living in Norway, Maine.

I applied for a job in a weekly paper, including with my cover letter several religious articles as “tear sheets” so the publishers could sample my writing. They hired me, and, although the publisher was of a far different religion than I was, his wife told me it had been those religious articles that convinced them to hire me.

Here I had a nice, modern, electric typewriter. Within a couple of weeks, the publisher bought us computers, those original little Macs that required a disk to operate. I knew I’d never be able to learn to use it so would shortly be out of a job.

Two weeks later you couldn’t get me off it. No email (not yet around), just the computer, which printed the stories on a separate printer. Hey, I could fix errors by just deleting the wrong words and rewriting them. There was one problem I hadn’t counted on until the day of the horrible rewrite.

One press day, I couldn’t find a long, investigative story I’d worked hard on, so I set about rewriting it. After I’d rewritten it, by accident I moved another story and there was the original, tucked neatly under it.

Lesson: always back up everything you want to keep on your computer. From then on, I’ve backed up everything, nowadays on those little thumb drives. Mine holds about 4Gs, whatever a G may be.

Still, people occasionally tell me they’ve lost everything. When I ask them if they’ve backed everything up,  I usually receive a long silence. Then my little speech, “Back everything up!”

Next came the laptops. This was great for two reasons. One was that I could take it with me to meetings or interviews and so take easy-to-bang-out notes that I could either store separately or change them as I wrote the story from them. Keeping notes basically forever was and is a lot safer.

I once had an editor, who said not to keep notes because they couldn’t be used against you if they didn’t exist. I always kept mine anyway. Besides, there was the guy in western Maine who was going to sue me for a story I wrote about him. I accompanied him to his attorney’s office. The attorney read my notes and told the man that he had no case against me since I had written exactly what I had been told by the various sources. The attorney suggested the man take me out to breakfast.

He did, we became friends, and I was later able to help him with a story that showed some public officials to be wrong about something he was doing in his business. The officials dropped their enforcement action.

The other reason laptops were great for me was the number of news stories I wrote while home in bed.  I also wrote at home on a table, in restaurants, on picnic tables, and any place I could find a fairly level spot. One restaurant owner informed me he was going to start charging me for office space. I changed restaurants. To be accurate, I did some writing at my weekly newspaper desk.

When I wrote for the Lewiston Sun-Journal, technology was changing. Now there was an “800” number I could dial on my laptop to connect with their computers so I could send my tales of news directly. Only film in these days of old-fashioned photography was a problem, and generally a driver picked up the newswriters’ film at the Norway office and drove it to Lewiston. For special, time-sensitive, very important pieces, I drove my film there myself. (Let’s hear it for today’s digital photography that can be on your computer within minutes and emailed to a publisher as soon as you are ready to send it!)

Laptops made Rotary Club breakfasts and Norway-Paris Fish and Game Club suppers easy too. I could take notes while dribbling food of various sorts and coffee on the keyboard. Of course, this meant the paper gave me a different laptop every three months while they had my overfed one repaired. Life with laptops was great!

Now that I’m a retired reporter and lowly columnist, I no longer use a laptop. I use our 40-pound eMac, which we hope to replace within a year with one of those skinny new Apples that can store three times the information as can our eMac.

I use email to send the columns, and I place the photo right on the email. One of my editors is somewhere in snowbound China, and he receives and sends my tales of nothing back to Maine faster than I could have gotten the copy in to the paper 20 miles away in those “bad old days.”

From those original days of postage-paid envelopes and copy paper for my old Underwood to now, I can well understand why the post office is having such struggles. Sorry, guys, for letting you down.

But even with the nice, convenient, easy-to-use computer and email, there are two old-fashioned things a writer cannot afford to miss. One is checking “spellcheck.” Spellcheck will correct misspellings easily enough, but -- horror of horrors -- it won’t correct a wrong word. If you type “two” but mean “too,” too bad. Someone human has to find that wrong word and replace it.

Which brings us to the second old-fashioned need, an editor. As I read the newspaper these days, I sometimes wonder if papers still hire editors. Someone has to read what you write to make sure it makes sense. Dolores these days reads most of my stuff. I read some, but I don’t trust me because I’m expecting to see what I think I wrote not what I actually wrote. You and I need an editor.

Without spellcheck and an editor, I’m just liable to make a mistook.

*Freelance writing involved either “querying” an editor (asking if the magazine would buy the story I wrote if I mailed it to them) or not, “not” being just sending the story in a large envelope and waiting impatiently for the rejection slip -- and very occasional check. If not rejected, a half-a-lifetime later, a copy of the magazine would arrive in the mail with the story included. Wow! I still have some of those old published stories somewhere in a dusty box in a dusty corner of my dusty study.

Milt Gross can be reached for corrections, harassment, or other purposes at lesstraveledway@midmaine.com.

Milton M. Gross Copyright 2012