This week’s news out of The Oregonian – aka Oregon Media Group (OMG!), aka Advance Central Services Oregon, aka Advance Publications, aka Who Can Keep Up – doesn’t mention layoffs. It just says it will be “saying goodbye to our longtime press employees.” Alt-weekly Willamette Week puts those who face that long goodbye at 100 to 200.
So what? Just one more tale of the legacy news industry being swamped by the digital tsunami. Pain on one front; progress on another. The march of time and technology. Horses to cars to rocketships and all that.
But this has me thinking about more than a few specialized jobs lost, or about a class of workers whose strong, gnarled, expert fingers might not be suited to the teensy keyboards on an iPhone. It also has me thinking about an essential part of the news operation that few outside our world think about, and even fewer see. And about what – and who – it has taken to do this work as well as it should be done.
So here’s an homage to the men (and yes, they were mostly that) who run the presses. They did – and do – far more than slap drums of paper onto massive rollers and make sure the stack-and-wrap machines didn’t jam. They never had a byline or asked for an award or even a thank-you. But they did their work in the communities they lived in. They cared about that work. They made my journalism better. They made me better.