[November 07, 2009]

OPINION: The Reporter goes higher-tech [The Lebanon Reporter, Ind.]

(Lebanon Reporter, The (IN) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Nov. 7--"Look what I got at a garage sale for $10," said Rick Whiteman, our advertising manager.

Whiteman then carefully plonked a Royal manual typewriter on the counter.

"What a segue," I said, and began writing this column.

The Lebanon Reporter has launched a Twitter account, I've started a blog, and by main force have been restrained from punning about either.

None of this will, of course, replace our daily newspaper. By putting ourselves on social networks, however, we're going to give our readers that much more access to local information.

But Whiteman's garage sale find, and my remembering I have a Casio battery-powered portable typewriter in my desk, reminded me how far the newspaper industry has come in the last five years, much less the last 50.

When I started in this business, some of the most technologically-advanced papers were using machines called "Justowriters" to transfer a reporter's story from typewritten sheets to paper that was cut, waxed and aligned on a full-size page template.

In the mid-1980s, The Lebanon Reporter scrapped it's IBM Selectrics and installed its first computers -- Macs, of course. Most of our news staff received a Mac Plus. As sports editor, I received a Mac SE/30, for it's blazing 8Mhz speed and robust 4 megabytes of RAM.

Those Macs were connected to our composing department, which used Mac IIs -- awesomely powerful computers that came with 20MB of memory and cost nearly $4,000.

About 10 years ago, the classic Macs were replaced with iMacs, then the G series. A couple of iMacs, in the Biondi Blue color scheme that was an edgy, ultra-sophisticated design, remain, used for nothing more than word processing. They are, in a curious way, the equivalent of an entry-level typewriter.

This afternoon, I'm writing this column on a Mac G3. I'm also monitoring my e-mail and designing Saturday's newspaper, performing tasks that 10 years ago required at least three other persons. On a laptop computer adjacent to my primary flat screen monitor, I'm keeping track of two Internet news sites and listening to one of my Pandora stations.

By the electronic communication standards of my grandchildren, I am hopeless mired in the Pliocene era.

Many people have said that print journalism is dead. I respectfully disagree -- invoking Mark Twain's famous remark, "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated." But print journalism is in a transition that has already put thousands of reporters and editors out of work. More will follow, as this industry compresses and readers take advantage of the "news this instant" capabilities of the Internet. And local papers like mine that have stuck to their core mission of reporting local news are better positioned than some to weather the storm. But even we need to change and evolve.

An example of how quickly innovation is driving the news industry is tragically connected to Thursday's shootings at Fort Hood, Texas, where Major NIdal Malik Hasan, a disgruntled and possibly insane Army psychiatrist, shot at least 13 people dead. Civilian police Sgt. Kim Munley halted Hasan in a face-to-fact gunfight, hitting him four times. She was shot, too, and is in stable condition.

Without the Web, without computers, it might have taken me two days to accumulate that much information. Today, it took me fewer than three minutes.

Twitter is about to introduce a service called Twitter Lists. They will, according to the Poynter Institute, a news industry resource center, "add a whole new experience to the social networking service." The lists will, said Poynter's Craig Kanalley, "enable users to follow collections of breaking news feeds, news outlets, specific journalists, niche sources, or any group of related Twitter followers." Twitter Lists could turn Twitter on its head and will be yet another challenge to The Lebanon Reporter, and other community newspapers who realize that our readers want information they can't find anywhere else.

In the industry, it's called "hyper-local" reporting.

Our Twitter address is lebanonreporter.

I'm blogging at http://rodmrose.wordpress.com.

Come join us.

-- Rod Rose is the assistant managing editor of The Lebanon Reporter. He may be reached at rod.rose@reporter.net. He blogs at http://rodmrose.wordpress.com.

To see more of The Lebanon Reporter or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.reporter.net.

Copyright (c) 2009, The Lebanon Reporter, Ind.

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

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