The Press: Small-Town Revolution

At 6 o’clock one morning last week, an operator sat down at a shiny new teletypesetter in the Associated Press bureau in Charlotte, N.C. and punched out a 250-word story. As he finished, editors in seven Southern newspaper offices pulled a perforated piece of tape from a receiving machine, fed it directly into their typesetting linotype machines. In less than five minutes, the A.P. story was in type, ready to be dropped into newspaper forms. Its news: the A.P. had just opened the U.S.’s first regular press-service tele-typesetting system.*

Widening Loop. The news was the first shot in a revolution for small U.S. newspapers. A.P. has plans to extend its seven-paper system to the majority of afternoon dailies in North and South Carolina and into Virginia and Tennessee. The rival United Press has run successful tests on a circuit from Atlanta, which will feed nine North Carolina papers beginning this week. Another 25-paper U.P. network will open in Oklahoma next July. And Hearst’s International News Service is rigging lines for an 18-paper loop in Ohio, to be ready by early summer.

To the small-town publisher, untroubled by big-city needs for several editions, the system promises real speed and savings in production. He turns on his tape-receiving machine early in the morning, gets all the out-of-town shorts and headline news stories he can use during the seven-hour run. Under most setups, he can find out what he is getting on tape by reading a companion printer which types out stories in sentence form, then he can either chop the tape to edit his stories or edit them in type. By press time, his tape-fed typesetters have clanked out the day’s ration.

Tailored News. The big changeover was not entirely painless. Wire-service editors had to abandon such favorite interruptions as flashes, bulletins and new leads, except for major news breaks. They had to cut down long, rambling stories from New York and Washington to a size convenient for the cramped space of small papers. For their part, participating publishers had to use the same sizes of body type so the A.P.’s and U.P.’s spacing would fit all columns. And they had to jettison their favorite eccentricities of style, accept wire-service punctuation, capitalization and word division. But publishers like the economies it promises. Said Publisher Dave J. Whichard Jr., after a U.P. test run at his Greenville (N.C.) Reflector (circ. 5,227): “I can operate three linotype machines with only one man.”

In other years, such innovations would have brought loud howls from the tough old International Typographical Union. But now there are signs that even I.T.U. is ready to deal with the inevitable. The changeover has not yet threatened big-city union strongholds, but the I.T.U. local in St. Louis is already training its members in teletypesetting.

* But it was not the first journalistic use of teletypesetting. In 1918, the Morgantown (W.Va.) Post experimented with tape-fed typesetters, and in 1930 teletypesetting was put to group use by New York’s Macy chain, was later widely adopted by others. In 1940, TIME modified the system for the simultaneous typesetting of identical magazines in Philadelphia and Chicago (and later Los Angeles) from one central New York composing room.