Opinion | Pressing forward: the news goes digital

Subsequently, the McPherson Media Group’s staff are free to become again what’s claimed on the group’s mission statement, “Innovative Publishing People”.

As from early next month, The News, and one of its stablemates, Echuca’s Riverine Herald, will be published just twice a week, back from being, respectively, a five-day-a-week publication and a tri-weekly.

Both papers will be available for readers on Tuesdays and Fridays.

It’s been a long and changing journey since sitting at 16 as a cadet journalist at what was even then a rather old typewriter at The Riv, repeatedly typing “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”.

Innovation is embedded in the group’s psyche, as it has been changing ever since I pulled on my first tie, making my mum hugely proud, as I’m sure she never imagined a role for her son so important in the community.

Yes, when I began, a flat-bed press rumbled in the back of the Hare St building, pumping out papers that were the outcome of work by linotype operators.

Printers who worked with lines of seemingly upside down and back-to-front hot metal words produced by this jangle of levers, a pot of molten lead, a keyboard and an array of typefaces that seemed to magically land in the correct order, along with pictures on blocks of wood and equally complex advertisements, were locked into a forme, holding everything in place.

Soon after starting at The Riv, its ownership changed, shifting from a Bendigo operator to the McPhersons in Shepparton, and I remember watching with interest as several men in suits, the big hitters from Shepparton, strode in the front door to mark their territory.

Leading the entourage was the newspaper man, known Australia-wide, the late Don McPherson, of whom I knew nothing about but who was to become a friend and defender, although I’m sure we viewed life through quite different prisms.

Life rushed ahead.

I spent a couple of years at St Arnaud in north-western Victoria, dragging a rather dated weekly newspaper into the 20th century, before joining The News in the early ’80s.

A short while later, I became the editor, and change became, it seemed, a daily affair.

We still had a press rumbling away in the back of the building, but the process of getting from an idea, an interview, to words on paper had changed notably.

The linotypes, the hot metal, had gone, to be replaced by keyboard operators who, using copy produced by reporters, created tape full of holes that in turn produced images that were stuck on paper to produce images that became pages of the resultant paper.

I was always amazed at the practised skill of the “paste-up” crew, who could take a jumble of stories and images, put them all together and almost magically create an image that would be the newspaper, after those pages had been through further processes in the plate-making room — another magical process.

It was not until we moved to The News’ present home on Melbourne Rd that I truly learned and understood the value of wandering the building and having a chat with all those from the administration, advertising, photography (they were directly my responsibility anyway), production and finally, and importantly, those involved in distribution.

Those were golden years, and innovation lurked around every corner.

Senior reporter Geoff Adams made sure all his young charges from throughout the group, which was continually expanding, were abreast of what reporting meant and how it should be approached.

Ray Sizer kept the company’s photographers on the cutting edge.

Jo Breen, as the chief-of-staff and later the editor, guiding the paper to major national awards, ensured The News covered everything in which readers were interested.

Joining The News in the early ’80s, I was fortunate and honoured to work with the then sports editor, Noel Hussey (a Stawell Gift winner), and the late Keith Esson (a former editor) and the late Tom Carey — all talented reporters, deeply embedded in the community.

Some of my hirings included the iconic John Lewis, who came to us from Britain and broke with tradition, wearing a suit for his interview only to talk with a jeans-wearing, pony-tailed editor.

Fascinating hirings included Dubbo’s Tony Webber, who now works from his home town doing media work for WaterNSW, and John Avery, who was an exacting and excellent sub-editor — but an alcoholic — and although with us for some time, it was finally, on the advice of Alcoholics Anonymous, that I sacked him.

But there was more.

The digital world was looming and, in the early ’90s, it was evident The News was going to need another change.

The “clackety clack” of typewriters had long gone, to be replaced by screens and silent keyboards, and with them, the arrival of a computer system that allowed “direct to plate”; a system that produced many sleepless nights for former printer Col Scripps, who graduated to being in charge of said computer system.

The News first embraced the digital age in 1995 with McPherson Media as the online aspect of the larger group, and it was that nascent beginning around which confidence was built and has emboldened this latest full-throttle move into what is a stimulating, invigorating and innovative form of publishing.

Events — a road collision in 1997 (it’s wrong to call them accidents as that is not what they are) — took me out of the newspaper world for several years, and early in the 2000s, I returned as a columnist for The News.

What a privilege!

Newspapers, considering the existing digital environment, may well belong in the past, but the essence of what they were and why they were so important continues.

McPherson Media Group managing director Ross McPherson often said — in what is a variation of an Arthur Miller quote — “A good local newspaper is like a community talking with itself”.

Hopefully, that “discussion” will continue in this new, and exciting, digital world.

Robert McLean is a former editor of The News.