Handwriting, Lead Slugs Give Way to Computerized Production

For an organization three years older than the telephone, The Crimson has seen its share of technological change.

And along the way, The Crimson's mission has broadened, and its methods have changed.

The Crimson has evolved from an organization whose only purpose was to print a daily paper to a "content provider" that distributes information over multiple channels--a Web site, weekly and monthly magazines, a course review guide, a guide to recruiting and, of course, the daily paper.

Once a building of typewriters and molten lead slugs, The Crimson today is filled with computers and high-resolution film, allowing a level of design, clarity of picture, and versatility of media unprecedented in the paper's 125 year history.

But there have been tradeoffs. Desktop publishing has raised design standards across the newspaper industry and The Crimson has followed suit, devoting more time and energy to layout than ever before. Close-outs are consistently later and extras no longer come out within minutes, since the time spent incorporating completed articles into a polished package has greatly increased.

But technology is offering solutions to its own short-comings, as publishing via the Internet allows The Crimson to announce breaking news to a potentially unlimited audience in a matter of seconds.

Refining the Process

Today, production of the paper is almost completely digital. Writers compose articles with the aid of word processors, editors download photos from the Web, and designers manipulate images on a computer screen.

It was not always this way, as Production Supervisor and Crimson fixture Patrick R. Sorrento can attest. Sorento started working as a press operator for The Crimson in 1967 and has been on board ever since.

Until 1970, Sorrento recalls, The Crimson relied on a "hot type" printing process in which molten lead was cast into "slugs" of lead letters and thrown onto a rack of type. Lead fumes and heat scorched the basement of the building while 15 press operators kept the presses running.

All of that changed in 1970, when The Crimson decided to switch to a "cold type" process in which a giant camera would capture each page of text on film. Production managers would shine light through the film, exposing a metal plate. The exposure, and subsequent development process, would change the surface of the plate, creating regions which either absorbed or repelled ink, and thus printed the image of the page onto newsprint.

During this period, writers composed articles by hand and gave them to a hired typist, who entered the stories into a device which encoded each letter as a sequence of punched holes on a spool of paper. The spool was then fed into a special printer, which decoded the punched holes and churned out a column of text.

Editors, with the help of Sorrento, would cut and paste the columns of text onto sheets of paper in a process aptly called "paste-up."

This system continued until 1986, when The Crimson purchased its first computer system under the leadership of President Jeffrey A. Zucker '86 and Business Manager Jonathan M. Weintraub '85.

Writers could now compose articles on "dumb terminals" connected to a central computer, much like the HOLLIS terminals still used in Harvard's libraries.

"They had green screens," recalls Henry Sicignano III '90, who served as business manager for two years.

Once edited, stories would be sent over a wire to a new typesetter, which produced the same columns of text as the punched-hole reader without the hassle of spools of paper.

"That was considered fairly complicated at the time," says Eric M. Candell '88, who served as The Crimson's first Manager of Information Services in 1987, and now works at Microsoft. "It wasn't something an individual would do in the privacy of their own home."

But there were still problems.

"If the computer went down, all of the terminals died as well," Candell says. "I remember frustrating hours when no reporters could complete their articles because of some shutdown of the type-setting system."

As time--and innumerable nights of french fries, cigarette smoke (since banned) and greasy pizzas--took their toll, the terminals began to deteriorate.

"They were sort of filthy," remembers Rebecca L. Walkowitz '92, Crimson president in 1991. "You could tell they had been around for a while--they had a level of residue of heavy wear."

By the end of the decade, computer technology had taken leaps forward, and the writing terminals were on their last legs. A building-wide renovation in 1991 provided the opportunity to begin anew.

Under the guidance of several executives--notably former Information Services Manager Michael A. Schoen '93 and Business Manager Elizabeth S. Hilton '92--a dozen IBM compatible computers were installed in the newsroom, along with Macintosh workstations for graphic design and layout.

All were fully networked, allowing a paperless transfer of articles from news-room writers to layout designers downstairs, who dispatched completed pages to a new $250,000 Linotronic (film) printer.

A Thousand Words...

Technological change came more slowly to the photo department.

Until the spring of 1995, photo editors relied on old-fashioned "screen" technology to convert photographs into black-and-white halftone patterns that could be printed onto newsprint. With the purchase of a scanner, which digitizes photographs into computer data, the paper took another step toward complete digital production.

Editors refined the process later that year with the acquisition of a scanner that could accept photo negatives, eliminating the need to develop prints.

"Getting a negative scanner easily cut an hour or two off production from a photo standpoint," says Tara Arden-Smith '96, an editor in 1995.

Electronic Correspondents

Along with the computer revolution, another electronic revolution was brewing as computers around the world were beginning to be networked together.

The ability to send messages--"e-mail"--over the global network gained popularity, and by 1994, two-thirds of Harvard students were using e-mail accounts.

Reporters began using e-mail to contact sources as early as 1993, according to Andrew L. Wright '96, Crimson president in 1995.

"We had one computer in the sports office which had e-mail hooked up to it," says Stephen E. Frank '95, a former Crimson editorial chair now reporting for the Wall Street Journal. "You had to be careful because e-mail would get saved to the computer, and other people could read your mail."

In fact, several Faculty members began to insist on communicating with Crimson reporters over e-mail. One of them was Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis '68.

"E-mail combines the immediacy of the telephone with the precision and non-intrusiveness of hard copy mail," explains Lewis in a recent e-mail to The Crimson. "Thus it is perfect for asking questions of busy people and getting quick responses."

Lewis cites two incentives for relying on electronic mail: time-efficiency and accuracy.

"My schedule is so tightly packed that it is very hard to get me on the phone," Lewis writes."I can read and respond to e-mail at the earliest available opportunity, even if that is just a 10 minute break."

"It is much harder for The Crimson to misquotemy e-mail responses," adds Lewis, "though that has occurred, believe it or not!"

On-line Outpost

Along with electronic communication came electronic publishing. Tracing its roots back to defense research in the sixties, the Internet grew steadily--under the watchful eye of scientists--and exploded after the National Science Foundation's landmark decision in 1991 to open the Internet's gates to commercial use.

A year earlier, an enterprising researcher in Geneva had written the software that laid the foundation for what became the World Wide Web. The first Web "browser" was released in 1991, and the number of Web servers--the equivalent of printing presses in cyberspace--jumped from 50 in 1993, to four million in 1995, and over 16 million in 1997.

The Crimson went on-line in the spring of 1994 when former Managing Editor Joe Mathews '95 collaborated with the Harvard Computer Society to publish The Crimson's top four stories on the Internet each night using an early information distribution service called Gopher.

A Web site came soon afterward in the spring of 1995. Articles were inconsistently entered until the summer of 1997, when a revamped Web site was released with daily article postings and an archive search feature.

Mathews says a transition to publishing on the Internet was inevitable, but The Crimson dragged its feet in going online.

"We were just oblivious--The Crimson had too many damn Social Studies and Hist. and Lit. majors," says the former Social Studies graduate.

Moving into the Future

The changes have left some nostalgic for the past but have given others inspiration for further innovation.

"Lots of people have lost a certain level of basic skills," Walkowitz says. "When we first transferred over [to new computers in 1991] we all still knew how to paste up."

Today's outgoing business manager Matthew L. Kramer '98 agrees but has a different perspective."The art has changed. Instead of paste-up, now it's a different art, the art of [desktop publishing]."

Sorrento is an unabashed believer in the value of the traditional ways.

"I miss a lot of the old stuff," he says. "It's like working in a laboratory now. The real skill of putting it all together on a page is gone."

Still, The Crimson is moving steadily forward, and in the next year plans to revamp and upgrade its seven-year-old computer system. Each newsroom computer will have full access to e-mail, Lexis-Nexis, and the World Wide Web, which will enable reporters to take full advantage of the wealth of resources available to them.

Furthermore, The Crimson hopes to take advantage of these Internet advances to provide a new set of services to the Harvard community.

In recent months The Crimson has added a non-line calendar to which students can submit future events over the Web. Supplements to articles in the paper have also been published on-line, and certain important events, like Undergraduate Council elections, have been published over the Web before they have hit the newsstands.

These changes were unexpected to many of the Crimson's former editors.

"I doubt we would have ever anticipated a non-line version of our paper," says Candell. "I very much had my head down thinking about getting our print paper out, and I don't know that we would have thought along the lines of entirely new ways of getting the news to people."

The Crimson held its first on-line comp this past fall, and Jennifer 8. Lee '99, former on-line director and incoming vice-president predicts that the on-line board will grow to be the third-largest department of the paper behind news and business.

"The Crimson is growing beyond just the narrow scale of a newspaper. We aim to be an information broker for Harvard's campus," Lee says. "In the future, the Web site will be much more of an equal to the printed paper or even superior."

Kramer believes that the growth of the Web site is simply one more step in The Crimson's evolution from a newspaper printing organization to a more generalized source of news, delivered through many different channels.

"We've really pushed ourselves in the past year to be a content-provider," says Kramer.