{"id":122,"date":"2003-10-07T07:40:50","date_gmt":"2003-10-07T07:40:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/?p=122"},"modified":"2003-10-07T07:40:50","modified_gmt":"2003-10-07T07:40:50","slug":"bong-update","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/2003\/10\/bong-update\/","title":{"rendered":"BONG update"},"content":{"rendered":"

Charley Stough’s latest BONG Bull is out. Among the fun stuff is an anecdote from one of the folks at F5, a free weekly in Wichita<\/a> that seems to demonstrate that coolness can stand up to a strong west wind. If you’ve seen the movie Twister you should remember what F5 means. I sent Charley an e-mail requesting unforgettable horror stories of the transition from hot type to cold type. Here’s one of Charley’s lingering memories: <\/p>\n

\nGee, we can’t think of any, except maybe when Dayton Daily News
\naviation writer Jack Jones’s 1,575-word story turned up in the
\nclassified ads one day around 1975, about six months after it had
\nappeared in the news columns. Jonesy didn’t have to pay for the ad so it
\ndidn’t seem important at the time. <\/p>\n

Then there was all that plugger stuff we edited, printed out and kept
\nin what became known as the Disaster Can, to be slapped onto the pages
\nin the event of a major breakdown; yard-long stuff about Ethiopian
\ngoats, etc. More than once we caught yahoos from the Journal Herald down
\non our floor, rifling drawers for that can. <\/p>\n

And there was the midnight shift created so someone came in and
\npurged the old Hendrix drums to make room for incoming wire stuff. Cox
\nhad a visceral hatred of night differential pay in 1976, so it offered
\n$5 weekly merit raises to five editors for doing the lob shift. They got
\nthe chore one week out of five, amounting to a $5 per-shift
\ndifferential-that-never-was. Well, it took the geeks about six months to
\ncobble together an automatic purge and the shift was abolished, but
\nmerit raises don’t end. The last of the Graveyard 5 still on the
\npayroll, BONG’s Chief Copyboy clocked something more than $6,000 for the
\nwork by the time retirement came in 2001. And yes, Guild-organized DDN
\ndoes pay a night differential now: $3 per shift.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As always, the latest Bull is online at Newsgorilla<\/a> and Topica<\/a>.

On the subject of technological horrors: At my previous job, one of the old-timers loved to tell the story of a 1970s vintage typesetting computer so underpowered that only one story could be typeset at a time, so somebody would raise an arm high in the air to signify that a story was being typeset. Before sending the story, people had to scan the newsroom for raised hands. I love telling this story in combination with the experience I had while visiting washingtonpost.com for a job interview in the summer of 1999. Apparently the Post’s Website had a similar problem, except that only one story could be posted to the Web at a time, so somebody would have to shout “POSTING” to the rest of the newsroom to avoid getting things crossed up. Presumably this problem has been fixed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Charley Stough’s latest BONG Bull is out. Among the fun stuff is an anecdote from one of the folks at F5, a free weekly in Wichita that seems to demonstrate that coolness can stand up to a strong west wind.…<\/p>\n

Read more →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[19],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=122"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}