When I left the plains of Kansas and came to a new home in Middlebury 42 years ago, the sights and sounds of the news operation at the Addison County Independent were familiar. Manual typewriters were clacking away at three desks in the newsroom, two or three typesetters were transcribing the edited versions of those typewritten pages — all manually marked up in red ink by a word-conscience editor seeking brevity — onto Compugraphic machines that then exposed long, three-inch-wide rolls of photographic paper, which were taken upstairs to the darkroom and developed in a photo-chemical bath to reveal long columns of text.
The rolls of text were taken back to the graphic layout tables where they were sent through a waxing machine that coated the backside. That allowed the graphic designers to manually place the rolls of text on 22-inch-by-16-inch layout sheets, roll it smooth, add photos and headlines in a similar fashion, and, voila!, the team had successfully laid out one story in the 32-page paper.
By today’s standards, it was a painfully slow and laborious process.
But it was what we knew and not that far out of date for the times.
Paul Staats was the editor of the Independent when I bought the newspaper from Gordon Mills in August of 1984. I had just turned 31 and Paul had been in the business for 30-plus years by then, a good number at the Addy Indy. I’ll never forget how fast he pounded out stories on an old beater of a typewriter using just the forefinger of each hand. I never actually clocked him, but I’m sure he hit 60 words a minute, which created quite the clatter of keystrokes, the ring of the carriage return every 15 seconds or so, and the occasional drag on his ever-present cigarette between thoughts.
Just watching him, I knew Paul was that classic editor: relentlessly pursuing news from dozens of sources each day letting nothing big faze him, nor was any item too small to escape his attention.
He also knew everyone in the county and had half of their phone numbers in his head. Paul also took a number of the paper’s photos on an old 2¼-inch box camera, a Yashica that I still have in my office, that was nearly impossible to take action shots with because of a viewfinder that looked down instead of directly at the action. Paul, nonetheless, was surprisingly good at it, including shooting sports. He had help from reporters Marg Sharp, Violet Chatfield and her son, Bob Chatfield, who would cover sports for the first few years.
What I found in the newsroom in those early days at the Independent was representative of the rest of the shop. The production department was always humming, pasting up the pages full of ads in those years before the internet. That was when full-page and double-truck grocery ads were typical, auto-dealers tried to get every car on their lot listed in 8-pt type for that week’s ad, and retailers — from the men’s clothing store downtown to one of several women’s clothing stores, not to mention Lazarus department store, which had shoes and clothes for the whole family — had weekly specials depending on the season. Not only were the ads plentiful, but crafting them was an art with the X-Acto knife as the tool of the trade. And because it was all done by hand, everything took time, loads of time.
And frustration. Those were the days when graphic designers would spend an hour on an ad, have the ad representative take it for a proof, only to come back with multiple changes requiring the designers to tear it apart and remake it by hand. Ugh.
But that was the easy part compared to plating the pages on thin aluminum sheets, snapping them onto the very small Goss press we had at the time, and running the paper off in 4- and 8-page sections — sans color. For the most part, back in 1984, we were a black-and-white paper, with our ability to add color very limited.
The one fun aspect of those times was when we ramped up the printing press, everyone pitched in to take the papers off the press, manually insert sections inside the other (usually 4 sections, including a whole section of classified ads), bundle them in mail-sorted routes, bag them up and take them to the post office. It was a half day of collaboration between departments that had everyone feeling as if we’d just given birth to another exciting issue.
Glamorize the old days all you want, but the computer age has made writing, editing, graphic design, photography, page layout and printing a snap in comparison.
Today’s newsroom finds a beefed-up team of three fulltime reporters (Marin Howell, Sophia Keshmiri and John Flowers), managing editor John McCright, digital and assistant news editor Kelsey Wood, arts and leisure editor/designer and co-publisher Elsie Lynn-Parini, photographer Steve James, and myself on editorials (as well as a few stories now and then; Christy Lynn also writes for the special sections.) That’s 9 of the 18 of us who directly contribute to the news content. Plus, we have several town correspondents and a bevy of columnists — Karl Lindholm and Matthew Dickerson in sports, our dozen Ways of Seeing columnists, contributors to the Neighbor Matters monthly series, Ken Corey who writes a monthly astronomy column (Look Up), and the occasional special series by various community writers on timely topics.
The focus is more on content today partly because the editing, proofing, graphic design and printing the physical product have all become so much more efficient.
Much of that change came with my arrival at the Independent. Just 18 months after I got here, Paul died of a sudden heart attack in 1986 at the age of 58. By then we had our first Apple IIe (first released in 1983) and the upgraded MacIntosh II (first released in 1984) and were exploring the advantages. News editor Tim Peek joined the team, along with a bevy of new reporters: Steve Rosenfeld, Deb Brighton, Bernie Dagenais, photographer Frank Coco and others. John Flowers joined the team a few years later, in 1990, and long-time sports reporter Andy Kirkalky, who also covered the Vergennes beat, started shortly thereafter.
We were soon all on computers in the newsroom with consequent changes in the production department and advertising sales. Speaking of those two departments, our current production manager Sue Leggett started with the Independent at age 19 and became production manager at the young age of 22, when I arrived. It might have been my first in-house promotion — and one of my smartest moves. Through all of the changes in production, she’s been our rock in keeping up with the technology and putting the finishing touches in page design for the past 42 years, plus a few years before my arrival. Jane Spencer was the newly promoted advertising manager when I arrived, and she ran a bustling department for 30 years through the first decade of the 2000s, before moving on to doing other things in the community, including at Bixby Library.
The two departments of any newspaper not yet mentioned are in the front — business and circulation. As with everything, computer upgrades have made the work more efficient; we used to have metal plates imprinted with names and addresses that would then be used to stamp (with ink) the subscriber’s name and address onto the front page of the paper for delivery — though the work itself is largely unchanged. Vicki Nolette is the front office manager and she will tell you the crucial skills required have always been: attention to detail (billing), excellent phone skills, knowing customers and their advertising accounts, and critical thinking to spot and question errant entries. Vicki’s trained eye and eagle-like focus have been serving the Independent well for these past 39 years.
What hasn’t changed during the four decades I’ve been at the helm is the Addison Independent’s focus on community and the effort it takes to report that news. That’s the same reliance on shoe-leather reporting, knowing our communities, reporting on the important stories and the fun ones. We are the mirror that paints the daily portrait of life in Addison County. It’s a job we take seriously, and which we thoroughly enjoy.
