By Julian Rael Gordon
From the manual typewriter to generative artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models – journalism and the media industry experienced a quantum leap of technological changes in the past 30 years. Die Matie reached out to previous main editorial members from the 1990s, current journalists and academic staff at Stellenbosch University (SU) to understand the technological shift.
Desktop publishing at Die Matie
In the 1990s, Die Matie used desktop publishing, producing copy with typography and graphic design software on small-scale computers. In the mid-1990s, Die Matie transitioned to What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) page layouts, using earlier layout and graphic software.
Die Matie was only a printed newspaper. “Doing the layout, there were two computers,” said André Lambrechts. As a BSc (Computer Sciences) student, he assisted with Die Matie’s technical equipment from 1996 to 1997. There were four other office computers. They had “monochrome screens”. For layout, Die Matie used Aldus PageMaker 5. Lambrechts said it was “owned by Aldus before Adobe bought it”.
He said that Die Matie “used PaintShop Pro for most of the graphic work” and “CorelDRAW for advertising and copy design”.
“WordPerfect” was Die Matie’s tool “for typing the stories”, Lambrechts said. For layout and proofreading, Lambrechts said “all the editors of the pages, whether it was News, Sport or Dag & Nag, would take a three and a quarter inch floppy disk, go copy the story over” from the writing computer to “the layout machine”.
When he was there, the computers had “16-bit Windows 3.11”. Later, Lambrechts said, they updated to Windows 95.
Network connectivity assisted desktop editing. “We got the internet in about 1995 at the university,” but “the campus was not networked together yet,” said Lambrechts. “That only started happening in like 1996, 1997.”
Die Matie benefitted from computers on the same network. Lambrechts said “in 1997, [they] got the networks together”. Die Matie “could then share files” between the two layout computers.
Page editors “had one file per page, all saved on a network drive”, said Frank Olivier, Die Matie’s Technical Manager (1997 to 1998), Assistant Editor (1999) and BSc (Computer Sciences) student then. “Somebody would yell out, ‘I’m working on page 7!’ and everybody would know not to open it until they were done.”
Die Matie’s newsroom “had one phone in the office that you could call from,” Lambrechts said, which was the quickest way to contact someone. Olivier said, “Students all had email addresses, but nobody really checked them all that frequently.”
During his time at Die Matie, Olivier developed and maintained its first website. He said, “I’d use Windows Notepad to make some rudimentary HTML, and copy and paste text from PageMaker.”
Die Matie’s photographers used film cameras for the newspaper. Olivier said the team had “film developed at Eikestad Mall” and used “a flatbed scanner to scan the photos” in Die Matie’s office. The editors then had digital files of the photos for PageMaker.
Preparing, printing and distributing an edition happened as “a print run every two weeks,” Lambrechts said. Die Matie’s staff finalised the newspaper very late on Monday nights. Tuesday morning’s print deadline meant multiple Die Matie staff worked throughout Sunday and Monday nights. On Tuesday mornings, some Die Matie staff “would take one of the PCs and just pack it in a car and drive it to Paarl Post,” said Lambrechts. They “networked it up there” and “copied the files”.
After floppy disks, or so-called “stiffies”, which stored 1,44 MB of data, “in 1996, we got the Iomega Zip Drives,” said Lambrechts. They could store 128 MB and others 200 MB. “They were thicker” and “slightly bigger” than floppy disks, he said. Transferring final digital pages of a Die Matie edition from the computers to zip drives “took at least an hour”, Olivier said.
Zip drives meant transporting a newsroom computer to the printers was no longer necessary. But, Lambrechts said, “Several times we got there and the files would be corrupted, so you had to go back.”
On Tuesday afternoons, Die Matie’s staff collected stacks of printed newspapers from their office “and then distributed them around campus on Wednesday morning,” as Olivier said.
Typewriters to browsers
“I was using a manual portable typewriter, the most basic typewriter you could imagine,” said Arthur Goldstuck, Editor-in-Chief of Gadget Magazine and Head of World Wide Worx. His career began as a freelance journalist in 1981 whilst studying and he later worked for the Sunday Times.
Goldstuck said the technological upgrade was the electronic typewriter, before moving into the “mid-1980s when electronic editing systems first began to be widely used in South African newsrooms”. One example was the ATEX system, developed by the Times of London and the Sunday Times was one of the first local publications to incorporate it. “It seemed to be the beginning of the future of producing newspapers,” he said.
Some journalists experienced personal computers (PCs) next. Goldstuck obtained an XT, “which [was] the most basic PC you could get”. He said, “That PC enabled me to dramatically increase my output to an extent I never could when I was typing on a manual typewriter.”
In the late 80s and early 90s, the internet revolution began. Tim Berners-Lee invented a “more visually accessible” internet in 1989, said Dr Lloyd Hill, senior lecturer of sociology at SU. His research focuses on language, communication, science and technology. He said that the internet browser was invented in 1993. “Between 1990 and roughly 2000 it was commonly referred to as Web 1.0.”
Research and contacting sources
Conducting research for articles and confirming information with sources required more work. “Research meant that you had to make phone calls, you had to go to libraries, you had to dig through filing cabinets and press clippings,” said Goldstuck.
“When I studied journalism at SU 25 years ago, we had to go to the scene of the story and speak to people in person,” said Dr Maranet Jordaan, chair of the SU Department of Journalism. She said capturing and presenting information was more analogue. “We did not have cell phones that could record conversations on the fly, and we certainly did not have social media.”
Artificial intelligence (AI) in journalism
The current technological shift for journalism is in the age of generative AI and large language models (LLM). LLMs attempt to provide communication resembling human language, by analysing large datasets to complete language-based tasks. LLMs and generative AI built on the foundation of deep learning in machine learning. Hill said machine learning began from 2010 and LLMs “hit the public market in 2023” with the popular example of ChatGPT.
“The way AI or the way large language models work is that they average out the information they find,” Goldstuck said. “It will turn a bad writer into an average writer, but it will also turn a good writer into an average writer.” That being the case, “AI has benefits for journalism” said Jordaan as it can do “routine tasks such as transcription, basic translations and scanning through large amounts of data”.
However, “journalists who do not double-check the material generated by large language models also run the risk of contributing to misinformation,” Jordaan added. The reliance on generative AI and large language models can reduce journalistic skills. “There is a major risk of deskilling across a range of human domains,” said Hill.
“People will not care about, or pay for, journalism written by machines, if they can generate the same information themselves by using LLMs,” said Jordaan. “The human element of journalistic work is so important.”
