Technology: Composing Room

Technology: Composing Room

In this video Janie Golightly describes the layout of the composing room at The Washington Post.

Zilvinas Paludnevicius

Drs. John S. and Betty J. Schuchman Deaf Documentary Center Collection

2022

American Sign Language

A video featuring an ASL interview with Janie Golightly, an older white woman seated in a darkened studio.

Jan DeLap: Big. It was a big space. Huge. It felt like it took up the full block. Remember there were 800 printers, covering different shifts. Most shifts had maybe 100-150 people. Over the years that number decreased, but in general. When you came in, the assistant superintendent of the office, was on the right. Next to that was the company’s office. As you entered, to the left, there was a hallway with a glass wall on one side, through the glass you could see the proofing area, next to the glass, and beyond that, was paste-up, next to that and to the right. Things did move around a lot, but to the left of the hall was Ad Control. On the right, the room beyond was all the linotype monitors. A lot of Deaf printers worked there. Jan DeLap worked there as fill-in supervisor. And further to the right, beyond that, were the real linotype machines. Make up was positioned at the end of both of those sections, in the middle. Beyond that was more paste-up. So, there was a section that did the news section. According to county, or food or style. That was there. Back on the left, was paste up for the first, A section, the front page - that was important there were two or three rows. On the left, back towards the hall, in the middle, was the dark room. After something was typed up, it was sent to be printed on film. One side was white. The text was printed on that, the story. Then that was given to paste up. They cut out the page components. First, they put that page through a wax machine, the paper ran through that then they cut out the page components. Neat columns of text, and placed it on a board - that was paste up. So the dark room output the page. Deaf workers tended to work there, I’d say there were four outputs - they would pick up the page take it to paste up and it would be cut- if there were mistakes, they’d explain what they needed and send it back to the dark room. That was there. Again, things moved around as time changed. Later Ad Control moved closer to paste up. The proofing section shrank to the news editor. Later a new section appeared. Now we call it pagination. You had advertisements and you had news sections which grew. The news room would send a story straight to the pagination section. You didn’t need paste up for them at all. It was a big change. There was another small room, on the right, in the middle, called control. I’m trying to remember what it looked like - there were three or four men who worked there. They sent and received things from the news room - not advertising, it was mostly news. And control would distribute it around the composing room. I’m trying to remember exactly how that worked. But that’s where that was. That was the space. It was big. In the back left, was engraving. That’s where they made the plates that were used for printing. They engraved the plate - the image was embedded. And it was sent to the press. They’d make the new plate and print it. But it changed, the layout. It changed.

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