Louisiana Voice

The year was 1966.

I’ve written about it before. That’s the year I walked into the offices of the Ruston Daily Leader to answer a classified ad for the job of an advertising salesman. With zero experience, publisher Tom Kelly hired me at $65 per week (a $5 cut from my previous job of climbing telephone poles).

I don’t recall ever selling a single ad, but I did morph into the position of sports editor before moving on to the Monroe Morning World as a reporter.

But this is not about my professional odyssey. It’s about the evolution—and the near-extinction—during my lifetime of the newspaper printing press.

Kelly, who is retiring after nearly 70 years in the newspaper business, has written a manuscript for a book on this very subject, so I’m not writing this to steal his thunder but to promote his effort which probably should be taught in every college communications school (They don’t call ‘em journalism schools anymore, they’re communications schools. The very sound of it sticks in my throat.)

I’ll never forget the smell that permeated the old building. It was a combination of hot lead type, printer’s ink and stale cigarette smoke. Typists sat at old, clanking linotype machines, setting stories in hot, molten lead—one column-width line at a time (thus the name linotype).

When it cooled, the individual lines of now cold lead were arranged to form a single page of the newspaper. A page dummy was printed for proofreaders.

Also contributing to the smell of the newsroom was something called a Fairchild photoengraver.

Photos were placed on one end of a cylinder and a sheet of plastic on the other end. The machine was started and a white-hot laser burned the photo’s image into the plastic sheet which was used to produce what was usually an indistinguishable square or rectangular-shaped black blob that passed for a photo on the newspaper’s finished page.

Corrections were made and the page was laid in an antiquated flat-bed press in some mysterious arrangement that allowed the pages of the newspaper to come off the press in order and neatly folded in all the right places.

Kelly went on the hunt for a new press. He found one, a tubular press, somewhere in Tennessee. The move from the old flatbed press to even a used tubular press was, to us, like a giant leap from the Model T to space travel.

In 1968, the old offices burned to the ground and Kelly still managed to get the paper out that same day, thanks to the cooperation of sister-paper the Minden Press-Herald, which printed the paper in time for delivery.

The paper moved to its present location and finally joined the 20^th century in going to an offset press system, a vast improvement over everything else we’d ever seen. In the mid-1970s, The Leader went to computers to replace typewriters and I have to say I had a lot of trouble adapting.

After all that, Kelly once observed that the paper had a “million dollars-worth of equipment so we can give the paper to kids on a bicycle to throw the papers in subscribers’ ditches.”

This past week, I was in Ruston and had occasion to visit the Louisiana Tech campus and my old newspaper and its publisher, Cody Richard, son of The Leader’s former production foreman, Elbe Richard. What I heard during each visit was disheartening.

First, I learned that my old college newspaper, The Tech Talk, no long exists as a physical, hold-it-in-your-hands newspaper. The publication that had chronicled Tech’s history for so many years at which Wiley Hilburn, Reggie Owen, Pulitzer Prize winner Stan Tiner, and a score of others had learned their trade, has gone digital, as has the school yearbook.

Blaspheme.

Then, when I visited with Cody, I learned that the Bastrop Daily Enterprise would publish its last edition on March 29.

It’s a sign of the times. First, it was the slow, tortured death of the nation’s afternoon papers. That went down in the ‘90s before the power of the internet sapped what remaining strength the printed page might have had. The first afternoon paper to die in Louisiana was the New Orleans States-Item, in 1970, followed quickly by the Monroe News-Star in 1980 (actually, the afternoon News-Star was discontinued but kept the name as its sister paper, the Morning World, simply took the News-Star name), the Shreveport Journal and the Baton Rouge State Times, both in 1991. I’m told the last standing afternoon daily in America was in Slidell but it, too, ultimately ceased publication.

Hastening the death of The Enterprise was the shutdown of the International Paper Mill in 2008, eliminating 550 jobs. The closure of the paper mill, of course, was due largely to the decline in the demand for pulp which was a direct effect of the decline of newspapers, thanks to the surge in digital publications.

In other words, a ripple effect: the internet causes a decline in demand for newspapers which causes a decline in demand for pulp, which causes paper mills to shut down, which, finally, resulted in the closure of a newspaper that has been around more than a century.

And eleventh-hour EFFORT to by a group of investors to save the publication was announced Friday but it’s probably only a matter of time for The Enterprise.

Finally, Cody Richard informed me that the number of newspaper printing presses in Louisiana is now down to only three—Baton Rouge, Ruston, and Lafayette—and that the Lafayette Advertiser will soon close its press operations in favor of contracting its printing elsewhere. (An update from a reader puts the number at four with the Lake Charles American Press having its own press. The number, of course could grow should it be learned that there may be others, but the point is the number of presses has been drastically reduced.)

It’s a trend of the times: Fewer and fewer papers are family-owned anymore. Conglomerates like Gannett have moved in and, intentionally or not, systematically destroyed local journalism with staff cuts in sacred homage to the bottom-line gods. Along with reporters, presses were deemed expendable, an unnecessary financial luxury to the stockholders.

That’s an incomprehensible development to someone who has worked in the business for half-a-century.

When I walked in the door of The Leader back in 1966, every weekly and daily paper in the state had its own press. Arcadia, Jonesboro, Farmerville, Winnfield, Natchitoches, Many, Mansfield, Opelousas, Ponchatoula, Hammond, Jena, Denham Springs, Lake Providence, Delhi, Winnsboro, Ferriday, Jonesville, Amite, et al—they all had their own presses where they printed their publications in-house. Even The Tech Talk had its own press.

No more.

Today, the Shreveport Times prints in Longview, Texas; The Monroe News Star in Jackson, Mississippi; The New Orleans Times-Picayune in Mobile. And the Times-Picayune isn’t even a full-blown daily anymore. The Opelousas Daily World, the first paper in the world to go offset, is printed elsewhere now. Smaller publications (where they still exist: many communities no longer have a local paper) are left to scramble to find someone to print their papers.

It’s a cost-cutting move made necessary by diminishing ad revenue as more and more readers go digital. You need personnel to run and maintain a press and maintenance itself is not cheap. By shutting down an in-house press, a paper even saves on utilities.

But it doesn’t make it any easier to watch the slow death of something that is such an integral part of one’s life.