Remembering journalism in Guyana before the Internet

Nov 12, 2018 News

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Imagine young people in 1979 sending chain messages on Whatsapp and making Facebook posts about the Jonestown Massacre, with information and photos traveling from Port Kaituma to Georgetown in the blink of an eye. Imagine getting as intimate a look into the business of late Presidents Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnham the way modern technology lets folks micromanage President Granger and Opposition Leader Bharrat Jagdeo. Journalists, back then, lacked the gadgetry that empowers the journalists of today.
Before the age of computers, social media and digital diplomacy, journalists had much more difficulty pulling a newsworthy story together. Imagine having the resources of this technological age half a decade ago. It probably would have provided a much deeper wealth of knowledge about the history of Guyana.
So what is it about typewriters and film photography that make older journalists wax nostalgic?
For starters, the journalists of that age didn’t have the Smartphone; a device that could do just about everything today that those journalists needed a recording device, a notebook, a film camera, a bicycle and a typewriter to do.
Today, just about every smartphone has a recording application, so that a journalist could revisit the matter they’re reporting on, just in case they needed clarity. Back then, you needed a special device that made recordings on 90-minute cassettes. Those weren’t always reliable, since the recording could have been erased, unclear, or not done in the first place because the device was faulty. This made dependence on notes even more pressing. Veterans like George Barclay, who covered the courts, were experts at short-hand writing. Barclay would have benefitted from the ease of typing on the digital, QWERTY keyboard of a smartphone.
If reporters today needed to take photos, they could use their smartphone then transfer the photos to a computer. Back then, media houses relied entirely on camera men who would have to develop those photos in a darkroom. Mike Norville, Ken Moore, Butch Nelson and Wilfred Lee were some of the more memorable names in that field of work.
Traveling to the scene of a crime or to a conference was more resource-consuming too. Most likely, a journalist didn’t have a driver or money for taxis as much as today’s reporters do. Veterans like Albert Alstrom used a bicycle or motorcycle to move around. Kaieteur News’ editor Michael Jordan, who is credited for exposing the infamous and still unsolved Monica Reece murder, recalled doing a lot of walking to cover that story. He had walked from the Chronicle to Main Street, to Reece’s East Street home, to a cousin that she had given some numbers to before she was slain, to CID headquarters, then back to the Chronicle.
Back then, press releases were delivered by hand or through the fax machine. Today, reporters could receive a press release through Email or from a website, without having to print a single digit on paper. Further, for research and background, Jordan recalled going to the Chronicle library to sift through bound files and books, as late as the 1990s. Today, more and more is being digitized, so much that one could find any Kaieteur Newspaper as far back as 2012, online in a matter of seconds.
Writing the story was more likely to be quite time-consuming. There was no autocorrect for misspelt words. The reporter relied on a dictionary; a physical one, as opposed to the digital dictionary on every young reporter’s smartphone. There was no backspace option either. With typewriters, every mistake meant that there would be another crumpled up sheet of paper in the waste basket. Jordan said, “At the Chronicle, you had to roll paper into the typewriter and write your story from scratch; go through it, re-write until you felt it was good enough for the editor.”
The editors, in that day, were much harsher than they are now. Jordan told of how he heard of editors “looking at a story, tearing up the copy in front of the reporter, tossing it into the waste-basket, and telling the reporter to come back with a ‘real story.’”
There was no ‘layout department’ of computers and computer-trained artists. Instead, a mockup of the next day’s edition, along with photographs and advertisements, was placed on the walls of what was usually called the ‘Paste-Up Department.’
Editor-In-Chief at Kaieteur News, Adam Harris, said that there was certainly a difference in the work ethic between journalists then and journalists now; that the difficulty made them work harder. They dedicated themselves so much, he said, that many reporters were essentially married to their jobs.
However, Jordan related that “while the reporters of that era were better writers and more knowledgeable of their craft, I don’t think they were as aggressive as the young reporters; particularly on the crime beat.”
If the young journalist that wrote this story were placed in an environment like decades ago and asked to perform at the same level, he would likely have buckled under frustration. Perhaps, for older journalists, it’s the challenge that they appreciated the most.
(Kemol King)

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