'Copy!'

"What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind."
Wendell Phillips (American Abolitionist and Orator whose eloquence helped fire the antislavery cause during the period leading up to the American Civil War. 1811-1884)



'Copy!'
By DAVID W. DUNLAP
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/10/weekinreview/10dunlap.html?_r=1&oref=slogin


LISTEN. The sound is muffled by wall-to-wall carpet tiles and fabric-lined cubicles. But it's still there, embedded in the concrete and steel sinews of the old factory at 229 West 43rd Street, where The New York Times was written and edited yesterday for the last time.
It is the sound of news, dispatched to and from the third-floor newsroom since 1913, the first year of Woodrow Wilson's presidency. It is the noise of physical exertion: the staccato rapping of manual typewriters, hundreds of them; the insistent chatter of news-agency teleprinters, marshaled by the dozens. It is bells and loudspeakers, the cry of "Copy!" to summon youngsters who carried each page of a reporter's story across the room to impatient editors, and the whoosh of cylinders pulsing through pneumatic tubes overhead with edited copy on its way to the fourth-floor composing room.
There, on clattering line-casting machines, words were turned into molten metal, letter by letter, then set by hand into page forms. Molds of these pages were dropped down chutes to the basement pressroom and used to cast semicylindrical printing plates. When the order was given to "Let go," a seemingly endless web of newsprint began rolling up from the subbasement to stream through the presses at such roaring speed that the whole 15-story building trembled and - it was said - The Times's ordinarily fearless mouse population grew deeply agitated.

Compounding the cacophony were hissing air brakes and rumbling engines, the boom of newsprint rolls arriving at the truck bays, followed a few hours later by the thwack of newspaper bales on their way out, accompanied by a crazy chorus of horns as cars and pedestrians tried to make their way past a factory in the middle of the theater district.

Manufacturing demands affected more than traffic. They dictated the presentation of news. Given the amount of labor, energy and material needed, it simply wasn't practical to produce a news report more than once a day. So a 24-hour rhythm, the rhythm of a factory, shaped how we all worked, how we conceived of news as something that could be encompassed daily and ordered rationally, since we typically had a few hours to collect our thoughts and put the latest bulletins in some perspective.

The era of Underwoods and Linotypes ended in 1978, when The Times converted to computerized typesetting. And the presses on 43rd Street last thundered almost exactly a decade ago, on June 15, 1997.

Tomorrow's news report will come from 620 Eighth Avenue, between 40th and 41st Streets, a 52-story steel-and-glass office tower clad in a floating skin of horizontal white ceramic rods. Its chief architect, Renzo Piano, describes it in terms of lightness, transparency and immateriality.

That doesn't sound much like an old-fashioned newspaper.

Of course, this is precisely the point. With The Times's own Web site regularly leaping ahead of the newspaper to stay competitive on the Internet, the once-a-day production cycle seems increasingly like a relic.

Lost for the moment in a world of orange packing crates, my colleagues and I are also wrestling with the implications of this greater shift. Having the newspaper manufactured under our feet gave the whole enterprise a special sense of gravity. And the factory served as a reminder even after the printing process moved to College Point, Queens.

But how can The Times maintain its gravity in the ether? How will it fulfill a commitment to thoroughness, accuracy and detachment if a premium is placed on speed, color and buzz? Can nytimes.com be produced to exactly the same standards as The New York Times? Should it be? If not, what will the new standards be?

And what will happen to that perishable, inky, labor-intensive, energy-consuming, tree-swallowing, three-dimensional commodity whose production lay at the heart of 229 West 43rd Street? How much longer will the newspaper itself exist?

Certainly, The Times has reinvented itself before. But it always kept one eye on tradition. History meant something here. Even younger staff members knew, for instance, of the legendary editor who could decipher Einstein equations and Egyptian hieroglyphs. (He was Carr V. Van Anda, and he was the managing editor when The Times moved to 43rd Street. His office was 15 feet from where I sit. It's now a vending-machine canteen.)

Newspaper people are not usually sentimental, but there has been a hint of wistfulness on the third floor lately. It's not nostalgia. It is, I think, a sense of some uncertainty as to whether the Times traditions can survive a move from the home in which they were shaped. Mr. Piano calls his new building a "factory for news," but it is really more a laboratory. We don't know yet whether the transition will liberate us or leave us unmoored.

We do know, however, that it will be much quieter on West 43rd Street.

Just listen.