How Steve Jobs helped us deliver some ‘NewSense’ and shaped our careers

By MARK PEARSON Follow @Journlaw

RIP Steve Jobs. I just laminated the Time magazine cover from October 17, 2011, depicting Jobs sitting on his lounge room floor in 1984, nursing an early Macintosh computer.

As you can see from the image, I’ve also laminated an August 1987 story I wrote for Desktop Publishing Magazine chronicling our experiences launching one of the first university journalism student newspapers using Macs.

I left the national daily The Australian to start my academic career just on a quarter of a century ago next month – at the end of 1986. Earlier that year I had attended an Apple marketing seminar in North Sydney where I was introduced to the magic of desktop publishing on PageMaker from within that tiny box – which appears quite large by today’s iPad standards.

Not long after working with my students to create our desktop newsletter I returned to The Australian to show the editor our creation. “It’ll never take off,” he told me. “It’s Mickey Mouse. Look at those fuzzy edges on the headlines – it just doesn’t look professional enough.” Little did he realise it heralded the start of the greatest challenge newspapers had faced.

Graduates from that program started their successful careers a step ahead of their industry colleagues – and many have remained at the cutting edge ever since.

For the historical record and as a tribute to Steve Jobs, to those students in my first journalism class, and in memory of my late colleague Dr Charles Stuart who initiated the project – I reproduce that article here today. I still have on my filing cabinet the mounted pair of white shoes those students gave me when I left that institution the following year to join the foundation staff here at Bond University. Why the white shoes? Well that’s another very Australian story. Enjoy.

————–

Desktop Publishing Magazine, August 1987: pp. 20-22

Case Study: NewSense – Journalism students get savvy

Mark Pearson, a lecturer in journalism at the Darling Downs Institute of Advanced Education, reports on how journalism students are putting theory into practice – on the desktop…

There’s an adage that you should never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

Journalism students and lecturers at the Darling Downs Institute of Advanced Education have a new version: “Never let outmoded technology get in the way of a good education.”

It was with that philosophy in mind that we introduced an Apple desktop publishing system last year. The course has not looked back since.

Students use the system in tutorials to write exercises and experiment with sub-editing, layout and newspaper design.

By far the most important practical application of the technology is in the production of a weekly newspaper using desk-top – titled NewSense.

It is produced by nine students in the second and third years of their courses as a practical print media option.

At the start of this year students approached the course as just that – another unit they had to complete to qualify for that mystical piece of paper – an Arts degree.

Within a fortnight their attitude had changed markedly. In just two weeks they were an editorial team, co-operating to produce the first hard news publication seen on campus.

Now, 12 weeks later, each student has experienced at least four editorial roles and the newspaper has even broken important stories later picked up by the established local media.

The roles of editor, chief-of-staff, chief sub-editor, sports editor, production editor and reporters are filled by members of the NewSense team. Junior reporters and sub-editors are recruited from among the 120 other journalism students on campus.

Circulation is just more than 250 each week and cannot grow much beyond this while a photocopier is used for printing. Readership is higher than the circulation figures portray. Copies are sold for five cents each to ensure an interested readership – the philosophy being that people will not buy a copy if they do not intend reading it.

Extra copies are filed in the library and posted on notice boards throughout the Institute for the benefit of those who miss the small distribution run.

Servicing the Institute community with news is only a secondary function of NewSense. Its primary function is an educational one. Even if the circulation was only 10, it would still be serving the primary purpose which is to provide a newsroom training experience for prospective journalists.

We see the technology as a means to the educational end, rather than the end in itself. The oohing and aahing at the wonders of desktop publishing has passed, and the miraculous process of on-screen pagination is largely taken for granted.

The students are products of a compuer generation and are not taken aback by the wonders of desktop publishing as an innovation. For them, the Apple Macs and the LaserWriter are simply pieces of electronic machinery which help them put out their weekly publication.

All are highly intelligent human beings, but none fully comprehend the time being saved each time they change the column width on their page and place another leg of text into a pre-determined layout.

Yes, pre-determined layout. I believe one of the pitfalls of desktop publishing is the temptation to leave the page design process until the copy is being placed on the page.

Students are encouraged to put traditional pen-to-paper layout skills into action before going near the pagemaking facilities.

Sure, things may not fit perfectly to plan, but to leave such important decisions to the technological end leads to a jigsaw puzzle mentality rather than a carefully designed, aesthetic news layout.

The same applies to typefaces.

We have all seen the typographical nightmares created by people let loose on a desktop publishing system for the first time. These do not occur on NewSense.  The students stick to standard Times face for all headings and text.

Some Geneva is used in the newspaper’s flag, and experiments with other faces are allowed in advertisements, cartoons and pointer boxes. However, the all-pervading Times face gives a sense of design uniformity to the production and reinforces recognition for the readers.

Photocopying is by no means the best form of printing, but we have learned to adapt the technology to suit the method.

We have found that solid reverses wash out badly on photocopying, while 80 per cent screens remain fairly well in tact.

We find we occasionally lose 20 per cent screens, but anything between the 20 per cent and the 80 per cent seriously diminishes legibility.

The Apple system is in a specially designated computer laboratory.

The networked system includes five Fat Macs, two Macintosh Plus terminals with disk drives, an Image Writer and an Apple LaserWriter.

A Cleveland translator allows text transfer between a large bank of IBM PCs and the desktop publishing system.

The course has had an AAP news wire service in operation in its newsroom for the past 10 years.

The next step is to have this connected to the IBMs and Macs to allow students to emulate the copy tasting and story placement processes of a daily newspaper.

As it stands, any AAP copy the students wish to use in NewSense must be keyed into the system before it can be handled on screen.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, because it encourages students to carefully vet the AAP copy rather than accepting it carte blanche.

The long-term plan is to expand NewSense to a daily newspaper with a broader circulation base. There are 12 tertiary institutions in Australia offering journalism degrees. The Darling Downs Institute is the first to introduce a desktop publishing system.

One side benefit of NewSense is that it adds a dimension to students’ cuttings files to show prospective employers. Although it is “only a campus newspaper”, a laser-printed cutting in a portfolio looks much more impressive when job-hunting than a standard old typewritten cutting from a stencilled publication.

In many ways the system puts students ahead of their prospective employers. They may be able to teach them a little about pagination when they enter the workforce, since industrial demarcation has prevented full pagination being introduced into daily newspapers.

Another Imagewriter is on order so a Thunderscan program can be implemented to allow photographs and line graphics to be inserted.

The desktop publishing system allows a reinforcement of the basic skills of spelling, writing, layout and sub-editing – all essential features of a journalism course. It also puts the printing process in the domain of the journalist, thus making him or her much more aware of the reasons behind deadline constraints.

Speaking of which, you’ll have to excuse me. Our weekly news conference is just about to start.

© Mark Pearson 1987 and 2011

Disclaimer: While I write about media law and ethics, nothing here should be construed as legal advice. I am an academic, not a lawyer. My only advice is that you consult a lawyer before taking any legal risks.