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Rob Carrigan specializes in prepress systems for weekly newspapers. |
In an effort to put information together on the technology challenges of operating in the mountains, I went through my e-mail contacts and asked for tips, tricks and any interesting stories about the subject. Following are some of the more colorful responses I received.
“All the time we owned newspapers in Alaska, not once did we have to use sled dogs to get copy to the printer. Hard to believe, isn’t it?” wrote Mike Lindsey of Media Consultants Inc. Lindsey is my former employer and one-time owner of papers in Wyoming, Alaska, Idaho and Arizona. “We had one of the most modern newspapers in the state — all state-of-the-art, Macintosh-driven, Photoshop, etc. We even had the capability to modem our paper to the printer.
“Alaska is an extremely progressive state, and we found our employees very capable and willing to learn new technology. Several of our longtime employees were natives and our best workers. Our biggest problem was with employees — people from the lower 48 (states) who wanted an Alaska experience, but headed home after the first cold and dark winter. Some employees were late in the winter because frequently a moose would be in their driveway, and they couldn’t get to their car. And in the summer and during hunting season, we had a high degree of absenteeism — when the salmon are running, workers want to fish, and during the fall, workers want to hunt. It made for a very flexible staff,” Lindsey said. “Sorry, I can’t help you with the equipment. We did send our photographers out on float planes, dogsleds and snow machines to get stories. Advertising reps hit the streets pretty much as all reps do.”
Suzy Meyer, the editor and general manager at the Cortez (Colo.) Journal, had this warning for me:
“Our hillbilly tip is to never discard old technology, because one never knows when the new technology will fail. We still have Linotypes stashed away. Yes, we’d have to pull a page proof, shoot it and go to plate, but hey, we could get words on a page,” she said.
Also responding from the other end of the Centennial state was Robin Kepple, editor of the Bailey and Fairplay Flume.
“We serve all of Park County, which is difficult because the county is quite large,” Kepple said. “It is about 90 miles from my office to the town of Guffey, Colo. Fortunately, I have a good correspondent in that town. Our county seat, where many of our stories take place, is 40 miles away in Fairplay. I keep a reporter there full time.
“Digital cameras, laptop computers and e-mail have been a godsend for us with such a long distance between towns. However, we only have a 56k modem and no high-speed Internet access. It sometimes takes 30 minutes to download digital images from e-mail, but that is still faster than driving to other towns, picking up film, driving back and processing film,” he stated.
“The slow Internet speed also causes frustration when we are trying to send our pages to the print shop in Salida, Colo., about 100 miles away. We send the files as PDFs in order to work with their new imagesetter. Occasionally, we have technical problems that cause us a lot of grief; however, as any good newspaper staff should, we persevere and still manage to get the paper out.”
Robert Gibson, interactive media manager at billingsgazette.com, the Web site for the Billings (Mont.) Gazette, noted the following phenomenon:
“In eastern Montana, people are sparse with dozens of miles between houses and ranches. Those ranches, however, are small businesses that need accountants and [others] to operate. Ranchers, farmers and their accountants have found that keeping records on a computer is far easier than in a shoebox,” Gibson explained. “As a result, and contrary to conventional wisdom, farms and ranches are well-wired with nearly twice the computer penetration as in town. And once they discover computers and the Internet, they discover e-mail, real-time commodity futures, real-time weather and entertainment in places where TV cable does not exist.
“The telephone co-op in eastern Montana discovered the same phenomenon and made itself an Internet service provider. A call to the server is local from any place on the co-op phone network, so there is no long distance charge for dial-up Internet service, even though the nearest server may be five counties away,” Gibson said.
“Simply recognizing that unlikely agricultural demographic’s potential prompted us to do some soft marketing to them and target them with some daily breaking news copy. Today they are a significant, fast-growing part of our online audience.”
And back in Colorado, near my boyhood stomping grounds, David Mullings, the publisher of the Ouray County Plaindealer, The Ridgway Sun, The Silverton Standard and The Miner offers the following anecdotes:
“Because of an uncooperative printer who was extraordinarily proud of his work (read: charging double), we used to print the Ridgway and Ouray newspapers in Denver — yes, 300 miles, each way, every week. We did this by flying our flats from Montrose, Colo., on a commuter flight [every Wednesday at 1 p.m.].
“The folks at Intermountain Color picked them up at the airport, which when DIA was built, meant going halfway to Kansas. They printed Wednesday evening and shipped it on a Denver Post truck at midnight. We picked up papers in Montrose at 8 a.m. on Thursday. I got to watching the snowfall levels on Vail Pass pretty closely and had to rummage around some trucking warehouses a couple of times to find that week’s news,” he writes.
The papers are now printed at the Montrose Daily Press. Mullings also deals with problems only a few miles away, but on the other side of the world.
“I took over the Silverton Standard and The Miner last June. It’s two mountain passes to our printer, the Durango Herald, and we take the paper on a Zip disc in digital form.
“My idea: Send it down over the phone lines. But then how to get it back? The rails of the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad run right by the Herald loading dock, and they run three trains in the summer. [My idea was to] send the paper down via a 21st century vehicle, and get it back with one from the 19th century. I never put the brainstorm into action because of slow phone lines in Silverton, and we’re switching Silverton to print in Montrose in 2001.
“The Silverton paper, right now, goes over three of the meanest (mountain) passes in America to get from our printer in Durango to our mailroom in Ouray. That stretch of Highway 550 is the most avalanche-prone in the country, and we’ll no doubt have some fun this winter. We are letting the Lake City paper be the guinea pig with the Montrose Daily Press in transmitting PDF files via phone line, but plan to ship all three that way,” Mullings said.
Rob Carrigan specializes in prepress systems for weekly newspapers. He is the publisher of the Ute Pass Courier in Woodland Park, the Gold Rush in Cripple Creek, and the Pikes Peak Journal in Manitou Springs, all Westward Communications Inc. weeklies in Colorado. He can be reached via e-mail at RCarrigan@aol.com.
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