Dialogue: Making sense of the instant images

By GARTH GEORGE

Nothing adds so much to the horror of modern-day tragedies than the immediacy with which they assault our senses. Within minutes of any major event just about anywhere in the world, the pictures and words are available to us.

This immediacy is something we take for granted these days. But it seems to have grown on us unawares, for the increases in the speed of communications have arrived incrementally, almost day by day for a lot of years now, but never so fast as since the internet spread its tentacles.

The atrocities committed in New York and Washington on September 11 were in our eyes and in our ears minutes after the three aircraft hit their targets, although we are thousands of kilometres away.

And within hours, the pictures and words were splashed across the front pages of our daily newspapers, which themselves have undergone a vast transformation in the speed with which they receive information and get it into print.

During the American crisis I have marvelled again at the flexibility and speed that today's technology gives our press; and have thanked God for the umpteenth time that we still have newspapers - those wonderful documents of paper and ink that inform and entertain as no other medium can.

I am grateful that I do not have to rely for my information on radio, television, or any other electronic means of communication. Had I to do so, I would not only be poorly informed, but misinformed as well.

And that, too, you can put down to immediacy. The faster the pictures and words arrive, the less time there is in the electronic media for editorial consideration, for sifting the wheat from the chaff and presenting not only what is spectacular and attention-grabbing, but that which is coolly and objectively considered by trained journalistic minds.

That's where newspapers win hands down every time. The time lapse between receipt of the information and publication is a valuable asset in this world of instant this and instant that.

It occurred to me again as the American drama unfolded how much newspapers have changed since I started as a cadet journalist in the late 1950s, and I began to think of how the latest drama would have played back then.

It would have been at least a day, probably longer, before we received any pictures. Radio news was in its infancy and television was yet to arrive. Very few newspapers had wirephoto machines and those that did would send pictures by air freight to some of the smaller provincial newspapers, such as the Southland Times in Invercargill.

Except in unusual circumstances, any overseas pictures we received were picked up off the express from Dunedin at 9 pm as metal plates already used by the long-gone Evening Star.

At the other end, a photographer would have had to take his picture, rush back to his office, develop his negative, print his pictures, then place them on a wire machine while others translated the pictures on to metal plates for the printing process - hours of work.

Today, newspaper photographers carry digital cameras from which they can instantly download their pictures into a laptop computer, hook it up to a cellphone and transmit them just about anywhere in the world.

Those pictures can appear on a computer screen at the Herald's picture desk within minutes of being taken. Only minutes later they can be put electronically on a page and in no time at all are rolling off the presses.

And the words? These used to come via teleprinter from the Press Association in Wellington, were sub-edited with pen or pencil, headed, sent to a linotype operator to be set in metal, galley printed, sent to a proof-reader, then corrected and manually placed in a page form.

From that page form a cardboard image was produced under immense pressure, then that image was transferred to a plate of molten metal which, when it cooled and hardened, was placed on the press. Hours from go to whoa.

Today the words come into our computers out of the ether, are edited and headed electronically, dragged into a space on a page, trimmed to fit and the page sent to the presses. It can happen in about as much time as it has taken to read this column.

You might have seen and heard scraps of it on radio or TV, even had some of it repeated ad nauseam, but you never get the full story - about anything - until you open your newspaper.

And, as a newspaperman from my dandruff to my toenails, I fervently pray that nothing ever fully takes the place of paper and ink.