When I went to work in a professional newsroom in 1985, before I graduated college, I did a few jobs that don’t exist anymore. In addition to reporting and writing community news, I distributed mail to reporters and answered the phones.
“Snail mail” and landline calls disappeared from newsrooms during the pandemic, when we all started working remotely. And they haven’t come back, even as we returned to the office.
Also not coming back: word processors without internet connections, pads of paper to design pages, and pneumatic tubes to shoot dummies from the newsroom to the composing room.
During the early years of my career, the tech we consider routine today wasn’t widely used. There was no vertical video — in fact, no video of any kind.
We didn’t have email. If you needed to send a written message, you inserted it into an interoffice envelope for a newsroom courier to deliver. If you needed to send a photo from one office to another, you packed up your film, got in a vehicle and took a ride across town.
As a young reporter in the mid-1980s and into the 1990s, I relied on Bic pens and reporter notebooks. My editor once loaned me a cellular phone to use on a big story. It was the size of a car battery. I took it with me to a rural area to report on a crash. When the pilot of a small plane taking me to the scene saw me carry the big, black box aboard, he did a double take and instructed me not to turn it on.
Next, I wore a beeper, which I proudly hooked to my belt. When I got a page, I’d search my pockets for a quarter and then search for a pay phone to return the call.
When I became an editor, I often came home at night with hot wax on my pants.
Everything was manual and more difficult back then — even something simple, like precisely pasting a columnist’s picture onto the page before it was sent off to the pressroom. There were no graphic designers, no layout applications.
But tech took off, and we never looked back.
We began designing pages on our internet-connected computers. We controlled the homepage with drag-and-drop. We got iPhones. We sent texts to our readers. We programmed news for Alexa.
And we discovered data. We built stories around numbers, and we look at analytics to see what readers were reading.
Over the past 15 years, I have done jobs that didn’t exist when I started in the newsroom. I’ve written and edited email newsletters, run social media streams, and worked on digital and artificial intelligence (AI) projects. I went from a reporter who wrote stories on green-and-black screens to an editor who has led our digital efforts for more than a decade.
But I don’t totally rely on digital tools. I often turn to the “analog department” — my experience and intuition.
Where will tech take us next?
I imagine one day people will see the old photos of us carrying iPhones, and they’ll laugh at those images — much as we do now at the sight of old tech, like 8-track players. Then they’ll blink their eyes to change the channels on their implanted brain chips.
In the age of AI, we should keep moving forward and stay ahead of the curve. Look back fondly on the past, but don’t get too sentimental. Whatever you think the “in” thing is today might be old news tomorrow.
Wherever newsroom tech takes us, our audience will always need us to inform them and explain what’s happening in their communities. That takes brainpower.
Jeff Kleinman is the consumer team editor at the Miami Herald, where he oversees coverage of real estate, wealth, shopping and tourism. A Miami Beach native, he began his career as a reporting intern for the Miami News and Miami Herald. He has covered everything from local government and transportation to crime for audiences in Miami, the Florida Keys and Palm Beach County. Prior to his current role, he served as metro assignment editor and as day editor.
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