120 years of SCMP: where the only constant has been never-ending change
- When Rajesh Thakkar joined the media industry in the 1980s, editorial staff used the typewriter, computer and bromide paper to produce a newspaper
- Despite the advances in technology, he still believes print – newspapers, books and magazines – has an important place in our lives
When I joined the media industry in the early 1980s, the first story I wrote was on a manual typewriter, a remarkable machine that few, if any, in Generations X, Y and Z would recognise, let alone understand.
I remember carefully pulling an A4-sized sheet of paper from the typewriter and, nervously, presenting it to an assistant news editor who, with a heavy sigh, brought out his thick red pen and proceeded to make various markings – arrows, dashes and other signs that only they could understand – and passed it on to a subeditor. I watched with eyes wide open.
The subeditor, a ferocious person who you would not want to meet in a dark alley, then made even more red marks, before entering a hallowed, air-conditioned room, where he, while audibly cursing, inputted the words into a “computer” – a device few of us had seen let alone touched. The room had glass windows, so cadet reporters such as myself could look into but not enter.
Once done, the subeditor pressed a button and the story magically rolled out of a printer on bromide paper. Meanwhile, another subeditor had, on a “dummy sheet” – a piece of paper with grids – “drawn” how the page would look and where my story would be placed.
The bromide was then glued onto a newspaper-sized sheet by the “paste-up” team. Hours later, that page rolled off the press; and just like that, the first news story I ever wrote appeared on news-stands across Hong Kong. I was proud as punch, even though much of the article was rewritten.
Fast forward to 2023 – the 120th anniversary of the South China Morning Post – and the newsroom and how news is produced and distributed have changed beyond recognition.
