Only a few years ago, the Internet commonly was called “the information highway.” More years ago, Associated Press pictures literally came on the highway.
In the late 1950s, when my newspaper job as makeup editor here was to oversee the layout of pages, I waited impatiently for the daily arrival of about three dozen AP news photos. The package of black-and-white glossy prints, a day old, came from Washington – down U.S. 1 by bus.
The AP bureau here also provided spot news pictures by wirephoto transmission. Scanning the photo from a rotating cylinder took from 8 to 10 minutes. Add to that at least a half-hour of darkroom work and optimum time for delivering a picture from, say, Washington or New York was about 40 minutes.
That, of course, doesn’t include the time it might take for the photographer’s film to get from the photo site to the darkroom. Messengers might do that task.
The “old days” came to mind the other day when Times-Dispatch photographer Dean Hoffmeyer mentioned the volume of pictures transmitted by wire services on Sept. 11.
Sometime between 11 p.m. and midnight, he noticed the computer storage receiver had recorded 946 images transmitted that day by the AP or Knight Ridder Tribune news services.
AP headquarters in New York City said it did not keep a precise count of the number of photos related to the terrorist attacks sent on Sept. 11, but said the total probably was more than 500.
Hoffmeyer said that, in the two weeks after Sept. 11, AP transmitted 11,008 images with the word “attack” or “attacks” in the slug, or title, line.
The development of small digital cameras and Internet delivery has meant nearly shutter-speed receipt of pictures in newsrooms around the world. Cell phones and belt-attached transmitters have replaced messengers.
How quick is the system? Hoffmeyer said he could transmit photos to anywhere in the world, even from his home, at the rate of one every 10 to 12 seconds.
* * *
The Times-Dispatch, as did other newspapers throughout the country, put heavy emphasis on photos in its coverage of the Sept. 11 attacks.
“We want lots of photos in this,” said Managing Editor Louise Seals in leading a quick planning session for that day’s Extra edition.
The 10-page Extra, on the press about three hours later, contained 31 images (photos and graphics) and included two picture pages in addition to a 9-by-14-inch picture dominating the front page.
The next day, Wednesday, the paper included 28 images (local and wire) in 18 pages of terrorist attack coverage. Only two photos, no articles, appeared on the front page, headlined “AMERICA’S DARKEST DAY.”
The Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla., bills itself as “a school dedicated to teaching and inspiring journalists and media leaders.” The institute also posts news, advice and journalism developments on its Web site, www.poynter.org.
Still up last week on the site was a display of 179 extra edition front pages from Sept. 11 and 237 day-after front pages from Sept. 12. The front pages had been sent to Poynter by newspapers throughout North and South America, Europe and even from Australia and New Zealand.
To enter the display, the computer operator may click on a color icon. The icon is a reproduction of the Sept. 12 Page One of the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
Out of 416 pages, why was the T-D chosen?
“Because I liked it,” said Anne Conneen, the Poynter online design editor. “I liked the images and I knew it would hold up as a small icon.”
* * *
Suzan B. McKenzie, formerly a columnist on a Texas newspaper, is working now at the front sales counter of The Times-Dispatch downtown building at 300 E. Franklin St. In an e-mail copied to me, she described the rush of people eager to buy the Extra on Sept. 11.
“By the time the first bundles of papers arrived, we already had a line of people out the door,” she wrote. “We sold papers so fast the cash registers couldn’t keep up.”
Each person wanted five, 10, even 20 copies, she wrote. A limit of five per customer was set, but the papers quickly ran out.
The initial press run was about 50,000 copies. Later, after a second press run of about 55,000, the Extra was offered by mail – $1.50, including postage, tax and handling, for a single copy, $5 for five copies, $10 for 10 copies.
Many ordering by mail expressed their appreciation that the proceeds would go to charity, she wrote. “One woman requested five copies, adding, ‘Please put the remaining money into the disaster relief charity. God Bless and thank you.’”
Enclosed with her order was a check for $50.
* * *
Last Saturday (Sept. 29), the B.C. comic strip depicted two characters looking over an asterisk-shaped outline on the ground. One character said it was “a chalk outline of a corpse.” The punch line: “He jumped off this thousand foot cliff.”
To me, it wasn’t funny in the first place, and I agreed with readers who found the “gag” offensive in the wake of the deaths at the World Trade Center.
Author Johnny Hart acknowledged the cartoon, drawn several weeks before publication, was “not appropriate after the attack” and that “we did scramble to have it pulled.” A substitute strip was issued by Creators Syndicate Inc. in Los Angeles, but the syndicate apparently neglected to advise clients a replacement was available.
No notice about the replacement was received by the T-D or by other newspapers checked by a national network of news ombudsmen. A search in electronic files here last week turned up the bland substitute strip that nobody knew had been sent.
Once again, as the chain gang captain said to Paul Newman in the “Cool Hand Luke” movie, “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”
