As with the rest of society, technology at The Blade has changed significantly since its founding in the mid 19th century. In this file photo from July 10, 1980, we see Blade staff working with what we titled then, “new automation.”
These machines, half word processor and half computer, were new for the time and cordoned off to one corner of the newsroom, which remained dominated by electric typewriters and some word processors. As you can surmise from the facial expressions of the operators, the machines were met with varying degrees of skepticism and fear, as well as adaptation and eminent domain.
Today the only typewriters we have are relics kept on warehouse shelves for ornamentation like old trophies. A particularly sleek Royal model bears a laminated ticket on it revealing it to be the machine carried with the reporter The Blade sent to Japan to cover Ronald Reagan’s historic visit in 1983.
While the stories we can cover and the machines that do so in the field and in our newsroom have changed dramatically during the nearly 100 years we have been at 541 N. Superior St., some things are remarkably the same. The third floor still produces all the news, the first floor handles the advertising, and the second floor is a mishmash of marketing, administration, and production. The iconic 3-story vaulted arch windows along the north side of building facing Orange Street still flood natural light into workspaces.
The on-site press here went quiet in 2014, and there are no more pneumatic tubes or carbon copy markups. And you can’t smoke at your desk.
But writers, photographers, and artists still hustle to submit work to editors who hustle to get it sent to production, now in mostly digital content management systems, but also for print production. There’s still a City Desk for local news, Features for arts and entertainment, Sports, and the Editorial staff to rouse with opinion. They still create the published material that appears to you in sections of the newspaper, on the toledoblade.com website, in our daily eBlade edition, and in Blade NewsSlide.
This year has given us no shortage of news globally, nationally, and locally, which we still publish considering local impact first, then national, and then global.
Go to thebladevault.com/memories to purchase more historical photos taken by our award-winning staff of photographers, past and present, or to purchase combinations of stories and photos.
First Published July 13, 2020, 10:00 a.m.
