By Julie Carr Smyth
Call us the last of the typewriter era. A generation of journalism students who clacked out their high school essays on the old technology and emerged from college fully immersed in a computer-driven world.
When I arrived at Ohio State in the fall of 1981, the typewriter was still a familiar tool to most students — as it had been, albeit in slightly more primitive form, to our parents and grandparents before us. So it wasn’t at all unusual to find typewriters populating the desks of The Lantern newsroom for our use. I can remember typing story and photo ideas for Journalism 201 class on triplicate carbon paper provided by our professors – one copy to keep, one copy for the teacher and one reserved, if our idea was accepted, for the Lantern editor who would be handling the story.
Nearby, though, at the newspaper’s editing desks, video display terminals were the emerging technology that every reporter aspired to get their hands on.
The first VDTs had appeared at The Lantern on a limited basis in 1974, thanks to a gift of the Gannett Foundation that made us the first college paper in the nation to acquire them. But, for many years, only editors and copyeditors got to use these Jetsons-esque word processing machines, which consisted of a video screen housed inside a bulbous plastic casing that sat on top of a one-legged, four-footed rolling stand. It’s impossible to describe how cool and advanced these bulky miracle machines seemed to us.
“I remember them telling us at the time that The Lantern was ahead of many commercial newsrooms in getting VDTs,” my classmate Mike Rutledge recalls. “I think that was the truth.”
Rutledge remembers arriving at his first post-college internship, for the Akron Beacon Journal‘s Columbus bureau, only to be relegated back to a portable Tandy computer, which was capable of displaying only three lines of text at a time. The paper’s limited supply of VDTs was reserved for the higher-ranking reporters, he said.
In the early days of the technology, the job of a Lantern editor was to enter stories typewritten by student reporters into the terminals. Early VDTs produced punched tape that could be fed into typesetting machines in the newspaper’s composing room and printed on photo paper as columns of text. These columns were pasted in pre-determined layouts onto page blanks then shot as photo negatives that, in turn, were used to make the printing plates.
In 1981, the Lantern composing room had just been moved from the printing plant on Kenny Road to a room adjacent to the newsroom on the second floor at 242 West 18th Avenue. So many of my contemporaries on the newspaper staff got to have direct roles in the layout and paste-up process.
Catherine Candisky, another of my classmates, was one of them. She said her job at the time was to type advertising copy into the system that, like text stories, would be printed onto photo paper in the agreed upon dimensions for placement in The Lantern‘s pages.
She recalls the era as a thrilling, but dicey, time for both journalism students and professionals as they sought to make the most of the steady stream of computer advancements.
“The technology was all new, so we weren’t that gifted at it yet,” she said. “And, because it was new, it was more susceptible to hiccups.”
By the time I landed my first post-college job at the Galion Inquirer in 1985, each reporter’s desk was equipped with a VDT. There, one of our jobs was to check the page proofs in the backshop for typos. I can remember dashing back and forth to a machine that spit out column-width paper coated in wax filled with the words or paragraphs we needed to place over any mistakes we’d spotted.
As VDT technology advanced, later generations of terminals streamlined the production process by dispensing with punched tape and sending coded stories directly to the typesetter.
The Lantern acquired enough new video display terminals over time so that reporters could join editors and copyeditors in using them to write and edit stories. The VDT had come and gone as a newsroom mainstay by the mid-1990s, replaced by early versions of the Macintosh personal computer.
Looking back on helping to usher out the typewriter era comes with a bit of nostalgia. I remember Robert Redford once saying that the makers of “All The President’s Men” put their hammering keys in the aural foreground of one of the greatest journalism movies of all time, to convey the way they were being used “as weapons.” Still, being forced to adapt to a new technology in college turned out to be perfect practice for the lifetime of new technologies that has been laid before me over the past 40 years. The VDT may have been the first, but I doubt there will ever be a last.
Editor’s Note: Julie Carr Smyth (B.A., Journalism, 1985; M.A., Journalism, 1991) covers government and politics from Columbus for The Associated Press. She was part of the AP team honored as a finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in breaking news.
