I recently picked up a new chore at the office.
I am very familiar with the project. Every week, I complete the Good Old Days briefs that run on the Opinion page each day. These are portions of stories that ran in the paper 10, 25 and 50 years ago, which would be 2014, 1999 and 1974. When I was a young reporter at the Cortland Standard in the mid-1980s, reporters sometimes were asked to help compile the information, if we were short-handed.
Good Old Days is limited to upbeat news, not crimes or other unhappy matters. The items are not necessarily the most significant news of the day, although they sometimes are.
The work also reminds me that I am “old,” since I was working in the newsroom in 1999 and 2014, when most of those stories ran in the paper, and I at least edited and in many cases assigned those articles. And those days were certainly not early in my career, as the 1999 editions were about halfway through my career in newspapers here and in the Capital District of the state.
Compiling the Good Old Days is tedious — including flipping through old bound copies of the newspaper from the 1970s, scrolling through microfilm from the 1990s using a manual, crank-operated machine, and using our electronic archives for the editions from 10 years ago. But the work gave me a look at old copies of the newspaper over several eras. As I flip through the pages, I see changes in news reporting and presentation over time.
I took one newspaper page design class in college and I have used what I learned ever since. Modern “modular” design uses blocks containing headlines, photos, caption other design elements and the articles, which are stacked and organized to make a page easier to read and to help the reader identify the information that the page designer believes is most important. That apparently did not exist in 1974, where article placement looks like someone dumped out a box of information and almost randomly placed it on the page.
Another big change between the 1970s and the 1990s was placement of local news on page 1. That never happened before the late 1990s. I remember a photographer complaining in our newsroom in the late 1990s that if a house blew up in Cleveland, it would go on page 1 of the Cortland Standard, but if a house blew up in Cortland the same day, it would go on page 3. But we were not alone, as that was common for many newspapers across the country for the longest time.
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“Working It Out” is a column by City Editor Kevin Conlon that runs every week. Disclaimer: This is not an advice column. I am not an expert at anything. I rarely do things the easy way and the last thing you should do is follow my example.
