CJR SCENE
How I Sent That Story
I throw together another column on deadline the other night at Yankee Stadium, and just need to transmit the damn thing quickly. That way, I can run down to the clubhouse, get some fresh quotes from Derek Jeter for the next edition. This is what sportswriters do. We churn out copy, most of it passable pop criticism, some of it worthy commentary, and then we send it over the telephone wires from overwrought pressrooms.
The churning and the sending are very different, however, and on this occasion I’m receiving that scourge of a message on my laptop screen: “ERROR ACCESSING EDITORIAL SYSTEMS.” I must log off the New York Daily News Web site, then call up the Web site again, then log on with my secret password, then create a file, then paste my story onto this new template, then transfer my file to the editors’ queue. Estimated delay: four minutes, ten seconds — just enough time for Jeter to hold a brief interview session by his locker, before disappearing into the trainer’s room.
While suffering such trauma, I try not to wish terrible torments upon the harried techies back at the News. Instead, I busy myself with transmission nostalgia — idealized flashbacks to sportswriting equipment of the past. Things used to be better. How is it possible that with all these computer chips, with all these high-speed lines, I require half a lifetime to deliver a story six miles to the south?
I first became a sportswriter in the late ’70s, when phone dictation was still the only option. Covering the New Jersey Nets for the now-defunct Paterson News, I would bang out my story in Piscataway on a portable typewriter, then dictate copy to an impatient editor. The sound of that pressroom, the gentle, non-electronic clattering of keys, is a zen memory for me now. By 1979, I was sending with a primitive fax machine, a spinning, flapping roller. I typed my story, handed it to a contractor, who required seven minutes to fax each page. The contractor always serviced the bigger papers first, but at least I could run to the locker room and get my quotes.
In the early ’80s at the Bergen Record, I was transmitting directly over the phone lines, employing fifteen-pound, primitive computers. I’d stick the whole phone receiver into the machine (we always called them “machines,” not “computers”), and the contraption would make terrible noises. If the receiver was shaped oddly, I was in big trouble. If it fit, I could send in about two minutes.
There were Telerams, which would store our words on tape and lose about half of them. There were Portabubbles, which were hulking, black things. Whenever the organist at Chicago Stadium played in the low register, my Portabubble would suffer premature transmission. If somebody kicked out the wrong power plug, stories vanished and wrestling matches ensued. My sports editor at the Daily News had an unaccountable preference for hybrid computer/typewriters from Texas Instruments. To my dismay, he ordered many of them.
By the mid-’80s, I was enjoying the golden age of transmission. Virtually every sportswriter in the country was issued a compact, eight- or sixteen-line Radio Shack laptop that had only two purposes in life: to record and send stories. It hooked directly into the phone line, not the receiver. The laptop had a limited memory. But it ran on double-A batteries for twenty hours, and all I had to do was press the “T” to transmit. One minute, tops.
Nearly two decades later, my conventional laptop serves a hundred functions. I can call up the AP wire, go on-line, message a co-worker. I am also burdened with layers of access codes. Security and paranoia go hand in hand. The New York Times makes its reporters carry little cards, which have access numbers that change every thirty seconds, creating a fresh set of neuroses. It seems to me our remote system at the Daily News is particularly clumsy, but then the systems department thinks I’m particularly whiny.
Eventually, somehow, all the stories get sent. I’ve transmitted from a rickety pressroom in Doha, Qatar, and from an airport in Harare, Zimbabwe. I’ve dictated from a hotel in Sardinia and from a disco basement in Belfast. The dream of instant connection is forever a bounce-pass away. The Masters golf and Wimbledon tennis tournaments are experimenting with wireless transmission for all attending reporters. Whenever new stadiums are built now, plans for the press box include rapid Internet lines.
I’ll believe it when I send it. I’m at Yankee Stadium on deadline, and my laptop is killing me, again.
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