Press
Unused technology
Bill Grundy
On the odd occasion when I
perikive rather than vacant el' I sometimes hit on an icle$ exactly the same momen„I someone else, and we both " simultaneously; a sort of "Snap!" At such times the amiable of my acquaintances$ apt to say "Two minds with single thought." I myself, altb naturally a modest chap, ,Fr, another way of putting it minds think alike." After which prelude, I W„ like to introduce you to mY great mind. He is Mr lain Mtl of the Business Observe more retentive of you, remember that last week l considering why the pro' press is in a much better I cial state than the national P The cause I chose to concel'i on was monopoly, the result°, erosion of competing P°: which, while it may reduc`, number of opinions available' read, at lease ensures that remaining are much secure:, therefore much more likelY continue to be there for the ing. I did, however, say that, were other reasons for the a of the provincials. It is Pre,f this point Mr Murray was a` with in last week's Business server, in a splendid articlet was probably being penneds.6 same time I was putting taPr typewriter. Mr Murray's theme was th,,eb newspaper technology, alwej Fleet Street has so far raft's have anything to do with Street, Mr Murray says, is " and will continue to use for c considerable time yet, "proclni techniques almost ident1c4 those employed to record t,P, vention of the telephone. heard few truer words than and even fewer so well put. „ Mr Murray concentrates et"$ technical innovations tb!,ip already in use on many pr°,',./i. papers. Things like comPtl's• type-setting and its exter! known as photo-compositiaor4i used for The Spectator), in an operator uses a keybus produce a perforated ribboa. is fed into a photo-corn machine, which produces 3. ture of the text with the lin; tomatically justified (that I ending at the same vertical 1/51 to give smooth margins, inf these lines are, or should be);f, follows more technical sttno the point is that a P5'
produced in far less time than with the present hot-metal method, Which is what the Linotype machine employs. There, the machine (designed in 1885, as Mr Murray points out) produces slugs of type in hot metal, which are assembled by hand in columns and arranged in frames, one for each Page. And that's only the first stage, there are about five more. I'm told someone has put forward a revolutionary idea that long thin, white, cylindrical things called candles could be used to light the Linotype room so that Work can continue after the hours of darkness, but they've got to be kidding.
As well as being far faster than the hot metal process, photocomposing is revolutionary in another way. One operator and a tape perforator can do the work of twelve Linotype machines. You may think the atom bomb revolutionised our world. You could be right. But you ain't seen nothing Yet compared with what will happen if such labour-saving devices are introduced in Fleet Street. Members of the print unions will Jump from high windows, Preferably on to the heads of Management. The snow-white hair of Mr Richard Briginshaw of Natsopa, will be torn out in handfuls; Mr Keys of Sogat will be seen kneeling in the street at prayer; the White Swan and the Harrow will be full of maudlin drunks singing 'Auld Lang Syne' as they sink their redundancy pay in draughts of Lethe water, and all Hell will, in general, be let loose.
A bad enough scene, you may well think. But have another go at Mr Murray's Observer article. In particular, read paragraph 4 again. It observes, in an almost throwaway manner, that "our national newspapers will be further threatened this October when the BBC introduces its Ceefax system, enabling viewers with modified' TV sets to receive 120 pages of continuously updated home and international news. It will cost about £75 to adapt a set and the service is free." Your own newspaper delivered straight into your sitting-room, continuously, and all for free! Oh my God. Get those sandbags out. There'll be fighting at the Fleet Street barricades. They will not surrender. Stand fast against Ceefax. We uphold the sacred right of Linotype operators to work on machines not quite as modern as the Wright Brothers Kittyhawk aeroplane.
I've often remarked in these columns that newspapers continue to behave as though TV had never been invented. Now we're approaching the day when TV will behave as though newspapers had never been invented. You may not have heard of Ceefax before. You will. Because when it happens, skin and hair will really start flying. Not immediately, of course. These things take time. For one thing, not everybody's got £75 these hard-up days. For another, not everybody wants 120 pages of news. (If they did, nobody would buy the Sun, which contains hardly any.) But, as Mr Murray says, "it is a portent of the way in which mass communications will develop in the coming decade." He can say that again.
Whether it will cause the Fleet Street ostriches to give us a glimpse of their heads instead of their. . . (well, let's say tail feathers, since this journal is read in vicarages and places where they cringe) is something nobody can say. But a man can think. And I think that our ostriches will be resolute in defence of the old methods, solid in defiance of the new. Then one fine day it will be seen that whatever they thought they were defending is lying in ruins about them. Fleet Street will be a desert. It is a scene Shelley might have been writing about when, in `Ozymandias,' he said: "Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck . . . the lone and level sands kstretch far away." And I bet you their heads will still be stuck in those sands.
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