"Welcome to the occupation ”  -- REM 

24. Introduction to the pressroom 

 On my first week on the copy desk at Charleston SC Courier in 1981, I was put in charge of the front page celebrity earbox. This was a "teaser" that asked readers to refer to a feature story in an inside section. It was prominently placed above the "flag" or "nameplate" of the newspaper, which at the time read:  Charleston News & Courier    Riding above the flag, the earbox was the most prominent piece of typographical real estate in the newspaper. 

The earbox was a small photo with a caption and a little headline and page number, inside a box. Its purpose was to refer readers to some breezy story about a movie star on an inside page. My job was to size the photo and send it back to the engraving department and to write a clever little headline and cutline for the photo. The head and cutline would be sent to paste-up.

One day, at the end of my first week, the earbox feature was a lunar eclipse. When I thought about the photo caption, I wondered, why write "the moon?" So I just wrote "green cheese" and, for reasons I will never know, I hit the "send" button on the computer.

Now in those days, you couldn't just lay out a page inside the computer and then print out the plates to be placed on the printing press. There were four or five intervening steps that required hundreds of people working in close coordination. Photos went back to the "engraving" department where a copy of original continuous-tone photos was made on a very large bellows type camera. The original would be sized and screened -- that is, it would be made larger or smaller depending on specs we sent back from the copy desk, and it would be covered with a fine mesh screen that would allow it to be printed on an offset press. Then it would go to paste-up where the halftones would be fitted into the type to make the final versions of the pages.

The type was handled by a newsroom computer system that printed out headlines and long lengths of justified copy onto photo paper. When it dried, the paper was waxed and taken to a cavernous room where a hundred people worked at long rows of slanted tables that held the original pages of the newspaper. The columns of type had to be cut out with an exacto knife and then waxed down so they would stick on the original page, called a "mechanical."

From the time I hit my "send" button on the computer at the copy desk to the moment the story was pasted onto the mechanical pages would be anywhere from five to ten minutes. At that point,  the other copy editors and I would go to the back shop, inspect our pages and have corrections made or  sign off on it and let it go into production. From there it would be taken to the platemaking department, where a full-size photo negative would be made of the whole page. The negative was laid down on a photo-sensitive aluminum plate and the image was burned into the plate with an arc light. Then the plate would then be put onto the press. From the moment a copy editor released the last page to the moment the presses started was usually about 20 minutes. 

But I learned to my horror that it could take a lot less time.

So this last day of my first week on the job, I went to the paste-up room, and there was my moon, pasted up onto the front page, with the caption "green cheese." We all laughed and I said, OK, joke's over, now take it off, and they all nodded and smiled. Somebody said OK.

Suddenly I was called back to the newsroom for an urgent phone call from home. Hang on, I was told, the operator is trying to connect you. And the operator came on and said she had lost the call, but was going to reconnect, and then somebody else came on and said it was urgent, to stand by.

And as I sat waiting for this supposedly urgent call, I felt the presses start up. It was a low rumble, not heard but felt throughout the three story building, and it felt like standing on the steel deck of an ocean liner. My first thought was that the presses were starting too soon.  Maybe five minutes had passed, rather than the usual 20. A dark suspicion grew in the pit of my stomach very close to the place where sea-sickness begins.

Within moments, the first newspapers came up from the pressroom, carried by a delegation of pressmen and paste up people who headed straight for my desk. Here it is, they said with enormous grins of their faces. Sure enough, on the front page of the first edition, for all the world to see, America's oldest daily newspaper had just declared that the moon was green cheese.

I was stunned, and as I faced those grins, I realized the magnitude of the conspiracy. For this to have happened, everyone on the entire production staff would have had to be in on it. How innocent could I have been?

I knew I was going to get fired, but I held back the overwhelming urge to curl up under my desk and blubber. Instead I showed the chief copy editor what had happened, and she nodded gravely and thought it over. Well, she said, Im not going to say anything, and you might still have a job -- if they dont catch it in the editorial meeting.

Fat chance. Gimlet eyed managing and executive editors gathered over the first editions like flocks of black vultures at the kill. With grease pencils and pica poles they ripped it to shreds, catching every minor typo, misalignment and ill-fitting headline. An error of the "green cheese" magnitude was sure to produce a collective howling from behind those glass conference room windows.

I drummed my fingers and feigned indifference, but as the minutes ticked by, the editors emerged from their meeting with the usual gruff instructions. Redo this head. Substitute this story. Hold this space open for the second lead writethru from AP... And nobody was looking in my direction. 

I got a few of those long-faced, bug-eyed looks from other reporters around the newsroom. Wow. You pulled it off, the looks seemed to be saying.

Somehow, the editors missed it. A mistake so monsterous, so huge, so glaringly obvious was also so unexpected that it was practically invisible. And as the other reporters held their tongues, I kept my job.

The newsroom miracle made me feel humble and numb. And I remember the puzzled looks on the faces of the editors gazing out at me from their glazed-in offices. Pressmen and paste-up people and others from all over the building, were literally lining up at my desk to shake my hand.

"Looks like the new copy editor is getting on pretty well," one of the editors said in a puzzled tone.

But in fact, I was utterly humiliated.  The pressmen had given an innocent new writer the centuries - old traditional "washing," and it reminded us all that they, and not the editorial vultures, were the ones who really made things happen in this occupation.