When I was in high school, I had a number of passions — white water kayaking, ska music, stuff with FOCUS — but the one that I gave more of my heart to than anything else was The Independent, a student-owned and operated newspaper where I served as Features Editor. If you know me, you’ve probably heard me blabber on and on about what a good newspaper it was. It really was something special.
I’m sure that modern newspaper printing is a very clean — antiseptic, even — process of laying out the paper in InDesign, PDF-ing it, FTP-ing it to the printer’s server, queuing up the job, and picking it up from them a day or two later. Back in the late 90’s, though, it was this delightfully messy process, where we had to lay the paper out on our home computers (we were on the very first version of InDesign, back when it was called PageMaker).
Anyway, we’d lay it out on computers at somebody’s home (we’d all bring our desktop computers over and set up camp in a basement / family room for the entire week of deadline), and then we had to print out all of the pages … two 8.5”x11” pages (one top half, one bottom half) per printed newspaper page. And we had to print them each out in triplicate — the idea being that you had three chances to mess up during the layout process before you were in real trouble. So we’d have this ream of paper, and we’d load up in a car, and we’d head up to the printers.
This was inevitably about 4 in the morning.
So we get to the printers, and we began to physically lay out the paper. The printer had these large pieces of paper with light blue grid lines — the paper was the dimensions of a newspaper page, completely unfolded, plus a little bit of margin. And we’d run each of those 8”.5x11” pages through “the waxer,” a set of rollers that coated the back of the paper with a thin coat of hot wax (see Figure 1 of this page to see what the waxer looks like). We’d then pivot around to the drafting table, where we’d lay the hot-waxy papers down on our paste-up “boards” (those large pieces of paper with blue grid lines), and where we’d then use clear acrylic rollers to flatten the paper onto the boards.
So why do I bring all this up?
Fred Wilson linked to The Fugees’ cover of Bob Marley’s song, No Woman, No Cry. One of my absolute favorite memories of high school is driving off to the printer with Jess and Ollie, to print our last episode of The Independent, at 4 in the morning, with this song playing. And every time I hear it, I’m taken back — back to those strings of all-nighters, working in some editor’s parents’ rec room, back to the late night (early morning) drives up to the newspaper printer to finish the job, back to the waxing machine and the X-Acto knives and the rollers and the last-minute typo corrections — back to all of the hard work and incredible fun of making this thing that we were so passionate about come to life.
Via fred-wilson
