The Humboldt Journal is 108 years old this week. Nearly 108 years ago (October 19 is the actual anniversary), Robert Telfer produced the first edition of The Humboldt Journal. It was eight pages long, with content already printed on four of the eight pages, telling of world events and containing ads for special elixirs and potions. Telfer would have written and hand-set the other four pages of local content. Hand-set means he would have set up each letter of lead type for the printing press using his own two hands. And because of how the press worked, he would have had to put them in backwards. I cannot imagine how crossed his eyes were and how sore his back was at the end of the day. It's still not easy to put a newspaper together every week, though our issues now are a lot different than what the Telfers had to deal with back in their time. Now, problems aren't with misaligned text or missing lead letters. Instead, they're with technology - pages that just won't pdf, internet connections that go down, computers that decide to crash just when you've put the perfect finishing touches on a long article, or photos that refuse to do what you want them to do. This week, fittingly on our 108th anniversary, we are dealing with new technology once again; technology that is meant to make our work easier and faster - and will, as soon as we get it all figured out.Looking back, it's completely amazing how far we have come, technology-wise, in this business in just the past 10 years. Just over a decade ago, computers were in use at the Humboldt Journal, but the system used to produce the paper was a hybrid between the completely digital layout we use now and the old system of paste-up boards and wax that had been in use for decades. Ads were being created and stories were typed up on computers, and then they were printed off, the pages thrown through a waxer, and they were cut with a knife and stuck to a large page. Those large pages were eventually boxed up and driven to the press. At the time, on the editorial side, we did have a digital camera. It held eight photos - an utterly laughable amount now, when the average point-and-shoot camera can hold thousands. It also took about 15 minutes to download those photos onto our old machines, and they still had to be specially processed and printed to go into the paper. When eight photos was just not enough, we used film cameras. Before my time, reporters processed the film themselves in a dark-room. That's not the case anymore.Our current digital cameras hold over 1,000 photos. We have telephoto lenses that allow us to get the hockey and football shots we once only dreamed of. And we have computers that can download those photos in a matter of seconds. When it comes to laying out the pages of the Journal and the East Central Trader, it's all done on computers now, photos and all. And it's sent to the press digitally.There are only a few things that remain the same about this newspaper now and 100 years ago.First, it informs the people of this area about the important things that are happening, and is dedicated to telling the whole story.And second, it's still printed on newsprint, so you can hold it in your hands and read it, wherever you may be. Some things are just too good the way they are to change.
