All the News That's Fit to Automate

The editor sits at his console, staring at a whole bank of television-type screens. With the flick of a switch he can call up the image of all the elements of his newspapers--wire service copy, a reporter's typescript, carefully catalogued material from the morgue. Wielding a tiny electronic stylus instead of a pencil, he changes words, makes erasures, shifts paragraphs. Every move, every judgment is recorded in the console's electronic memory. The job done, the editor presses a button and the corrected copy jumps into view, set and spaced just as it will appear in print. Photographs are chosen in the same manner, headlines are composed, whole pages made up. Finally, the last switch is thrown, the proper signal is sent, and the presses roll.

1984? Not at all, says the creative prophet who dreamed up the scene. To Management Consultant John Diebold, the man who invented the very word "automation," the thorough automation of the nation's newspapers can be expected by 1970. Diebold bases his prediction on a year-long study he produced for Marshall Field's Chicago-based Field Enterprises. "Automation," says Diebold, "is going to change totally the way in which a newspaper is edited --the environment in which you work, the tools that you use, and the kind of editorial product that you produce."

Times Will Change. It was only six months ago that the Los Angeles Times announced that it was experimenting with a giant digital computer to speed up the slow mechanical work of converting words on paper into hard type (TIME, Jan. 18). Now many Times reporters tap out their stories on an electric typewriter that in turn controls a tape-punching machine. Editors' corrections also go on tape, and the results are fed directly to an electronically controlled typesetter. The Times is now setting more than half its editorial type by computer, and by year's end will be using it for all of its daily wordage.

Across the U.S., more than a dozen systems, all based on computers to speed up typesetting, are either in use, now being installed, or purchased. Computers are controlling the movement of paper as well as type. Even the New York Times, which has been lagging behind some of the leaders, is getting ready to launch a study of computer uses for some 50 jobs, from billing to cost analysis. Meanwhile, the paper has just put in automatic, three-a-minute plate casters that promise to save the paper $325,000 a year and 35% of the man-days employed in the current stereotype process. Other newspapers have installed sophisticated conveyor-belt systems, and many have automated mail rooms. Papers are planning to use their computers for management studies, making out payrolls, for sorting and setting classified ads.

Explosive Situation. Electronic-equipment companies, who see newspapering as one of the most promising markets available outside of Government, have begun to design their wares to meet the demands of publishing. Their hopes run all the way from automated morgues to electronic page-makeup machines to press equipment that will run with as little human control as a computerized oil refinery. While the original cost will be high, the potential savings cannot be ignored.

"Today," says Diebold, "we have a technology that can brutally affect the whole guts of the publishing business. It is a very explosive situation for all connected with it." But publishers, who expected long, loud complaints from their unions, have not yet found massive resistance to their plans. The International Typographical Union has vowed only to force gradual rather than radical change, and to slow down the job-robbing effects of automation. Stereotypers have started signing contracts covering jobs on automated plate casters. In Toronto, newspaper owners have written a clause into their new contract with the Newspaper Guild providing for the retraining of employees automated out of a job. And when it meets in Philadelphia for its convention next week, the Guild plans to use the Toronto contract as one way to live with automation.

Strange as it may seem, it is editorial apprehension over the coming change that runs highest, and one of Diebold's staff has been moved to deflate the alarmists: "Stories must still be told through the minds of men. They must be edited; copy must be proofread. It is only the tools with which the editor works that are going to change." Amen.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.