To be an anachronism

Friday’s visit to the Arizona Republic was a revelation. I felt like I had pushed the lever in H.G. Wells' time machine and traveled to the future. The industry has morphed into something I barely recognize, and it is invigorating.

Please do not take me for an old reminiscing fool because the good old days of journalism should be left wrapped in funeral shrouds.

There was a time when print journalists would talk disparagingly about their video brethren, and never the twain would meet.

Television journalists were upstarts, commercial versions of real journalists. The two factions didn’t mix, didn’t respect each other.

The Arizona Republic, although some of their personnel admit the marrying of the two mediums still carries some baggage, seems to have embraced the possibilities.

The two areas that struck me were the ability to paginate and design pages in Phoenix for papers in Reno, Salinas, etc. So that local copy flows on a page that was created hundreds of miles away. That would have seemed pure fantasy in my day. One of my first jobs was working as a bureau chief in Chowchilla, California, for the Madera Tribune. I had a small office, and shared a secretary with a Realtor. I either had to call-in the stories, or type them on an encoding IBM Selectric, and then fax the stories, or drive the 20 miles to file the story in Madera. The Republic doesn’t need to rent office space because their community reporters can file from laptops or tablets from anywhere with Wi-Fi. Starbucks could be your office.

Jerry L. Miller

Sparks High School

Sparks, Nevada

What has the world come to? Emmys in a newspaper office.