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| Technology of The Argonaut |
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| Written by Argonaut Staff | ||||||
| Thursday, 09 October 2008 | ||||||
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Technology has come a long way in the newsprint world. With the power
and ease of the Internet, it can be difficult to imagine a time before
reporters could meet deadline via e-mail. During the mid 1970s,
creating a newspaper was an all-day process.
Technology has come a long way in the newsprint world. With the power and ease of the Internet, it can be difficult to imagine a time before reporters could meet deadline via e-mail. During the mid 1970s, creating a newspaper was an all-day process. Typed manuscripts to be published in The Argonaut were taken to The Idahonian, now the Moscow-Pullman Daily News, to be set. To be able to complete more of the process in-house, Argonaut employees purchased their first phototypesetter in 1975, a Compugraphic CG7200. Once the copy-editing process was complete, content was retyped on machines to create a perforated tape. This tape was then fed through the phototypesetter, which read the perforations as lines of text. The phototypesetter read each character at high speeds, about one character every tenth of a second, and then photographed the text onto photographic paper. The paper was developed, dried and cut into story segments. These segments, or galleys, would then be pasted to full-size mock-ups of how that page should appear. Once all parts of a page were pasted down, the negative image was created using a process camera, a special camera used to produce high-contrast images of two-dimensional objects. The negative image was used to create a printing plate. The printing plate, thought of as a large metal stamp, was used to do the actual printing of the newspaper. Photos were produced using a process camera, which takes an image of the photo as a halftone screen, or groups of black dots. A process camera can only reproduce one color at a time, so color photos had to be captured four times to create four different printing plates. Each plate produced one of the four basic ink colors used in printing: yellow, cyan, magenta and black. Each page had to be printed over again using all four printing plates to create the entire color image. The Argonaut office got its own set of computers in 1982, greatly speeding up the production process. A year later, PCs were introduced. In 1985, a digital phototypesetter was purchased, making it possible to feed typed material directly into the phototypesetter.  Add as favorites (28) | Views: 276
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