Garth George: News unfolds in black and white

The immediacy of electronic media is inferior to the accuracy of print

It's relentless, the bad news we're confronted with in the press and the electronic media. Read the papers, watch what passes for news and current affairs on TV or listen to the news on radio and most of the time you're left depressed and anxious.

That's not a new thing. It's been that way for all of my 50-odd years in journalism, and long before that. Bad news has always sold more newspapers than good news.

But today's bad news seems to have a harsher impact, not just because it's so immediate but because reporting of it has become so subjective.

No matter where they happen in the world - be it within a few kilometres of the newspaper office or several time zones away - events are in our eyes, ears and faces within minutes of them happening when once it took hours, if not days.

Take the aftermath of the tragic Samoan tsunami. It was, in all its horror, in our eyes and ears within minutes of it happening.

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 and on to the streets or into our mailboxes.

During the Samoan tragedy I marvelled again at the flexibility and speed that today's technology gives to our press and thanked God for the umpteenth time that we still have newspapers - these 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 for I would not only be poorly informed, but misinformed and ill-informed 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 finely honed to that purpose.

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

It occurred to me again as the Samoan drama unfolded how much newspapers have changed since I started as a cadet journalist in the late 1950s, and I recalled 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 prints by air freight to some of the smaller provincial newspapers.

A photographer 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 send their pictures via a cellphone or laptop computer and transmit them just about anywhere in the world.

Those pictures can arrive on a computer screen on 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 came via teleprinter from the NZPA 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 computers out of the ether, are edited and headed electronically, dragged into a space on a page, trimmed to fit and the page sent on its way 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 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 - even if they present every last subjective, tear-jerking word that can be milked from bad news.