Sometimes it’s hard to believe how much has changed since I entered the field of journalism four-and-a-half decades ago. Even as a high school student editor, I was engaged in a craft that was pretty much as it had been for the previous eight decades, in the long shadow of the introduction of the Linotype machine. We could see ourselves rooted in an even longer tradition of newspapering arising in the handset type era before that. Think of the New York Times dispatches during the Civil War. Printing was still mostly by letterpress, even though the newer offset method with its superior reproduction of photographs was making inroads. Every other week, I would trot down to our printer’s with our latest round of stories and pictures, get correction proofs a few days later, and then release the edition for publication.

We were quite limited in the typefaces available to us. I wanted what was then an elegant new typeface that our shop didn’t own — Times New Roman. Hard to believe how ubiquitous it’s become, or how much further we’ve come as well. But he did have Caslon, which became one of my favorites — in part because of its use in the Sunday editions of the New York Herald Tribune. And Bodoni, in part because of its indestructible nature, was the standard headline choice; try finding it on your computer selections these days. Photos were another matter altogether, as were student photographers. Polaroid shots were a radical leap into the future, and usually far more reliable. Polaroid?

Writers, of course, used typewriters. Not just reporters, but almost everyone except for the select few writers who could still write in longhand and have a secretary or typist service transcribe the results. Secretaries? Typewriters? Typists? And what often astonished me was how antiquated the typewriters in most newsrooms were — clunky old uprights, unlike the elegant (and electric) IBM Selectrics I’d see while passing the local jeweler’s, where they were rarely used. (Unlike those of us who were writing for a living.) The Selectrics, I might add, came into newsrooms later, only with the advent of text scanners, which was a huge setback for the written word. But that’s another rant.

Typewriters introduced their own traditions, especially on deadline. Reporters would finish the first page of a story with the line, MORE, and then begin their next page with a slug line for the story, say CITY HALL, followed by the notation, TAKE ONE or ADD ONE, and then continue. This would go on for however many sheets of paper were needed until the story was finished. And then the reporter would add the line: 30. Perhaps as — 30 — or #30#. But always thirty.

And that’s even without mentioning the carbon copies. (The what?)

We can argue where that tradition began, but it was universal in the trade. If the reporter was working on a breaking story, the first page could be sent to the copy desk, be edited, and even sent to the composing room while the rest of the story was being drafted. A headline could be written and set in type, for that matter. Minutes counted. The first part of story could even be set in hot lead type while the reporter was working toward the ending.

Editors, meanwhile, would be writing headlines using an elaborate tradition of their own. These were all valued skills. And the result mattered.

Sometimes, I can almost smell the newsroom where I became a professional, thanks to Glenn Thompson. Or his advice about keeping a journal. Or some of the others since. Still, it’s hard to believe how far I’ve come over the years.

These days, a news story comes as a single take. A computer file you scroll through. We paginate on a large computer screen, designing a page for publication. All of the highly skilled typesetters, compositors, engravers, proofreaders, and more I admired — and who provided me a safety net — are long gone. Am I getting misty?

There’s an additional reason. When it’s come to my professional career in journalism, the time has come to write:

30