A tale of dismemberment

There was a call last week from a reader wanting to know what happened to the rest of the story about the Hospital Authority's financing proposal being turned down by the Wilkes County Board of Commissioners. It seems that in both the print and online editions of The News-Reporter, the official statement of the outcome of the issue was inadvertently truncated, leaving the end of the story to read, "Reflecting that fact, there was no …"

Oops!

Now about 50 or 60 years ago it would have been hard, production-wise, to lose the end of a story like that. Type was set by hand and each letter was a piece of metal about an inch long and as big as the individual letter dictated. To lose the end of a story would have carried some weight, not to mention the mess such a heap of letters would make.

The advent of the Linotype machine changed things somewhat as, rather than individual letters, type was set line by line. Still, cast in lead, the end of a story would have been a weighty proposition and pretty hard to lose. Then, as hot metal gave way to cold type during the offset revolution in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it began to be a little easier for stories to be mishandled, forgotten, or lost. Type was set as images on paper and the simple errant swipe of a razor blade could send the end of a story fluttering to the floor to join all the trimming waste.

But even then there was still some handling of the story and a dismembered ending could hardly go unnoticed.

As technology continued to advance and cold type was replaced with bits and bytes and full pagination, even the slight weight of the paper disappeared. Type and stories are now "flowed" into their text boxes to create newspapers that never have any physical form until the press spits them out as finished products. Hence, during automatic recomposition due to a shift in print drivers, the end of a story may get lopped off to fall by the electronic wayside with nary a notice by editors or others.

That's what happened to the end of the hospital/commissioners story. Had our readers been able to click on the text box and then on the little red triangle at the bottom, they would have seen that the last words of the story were, "… motion and the issue was resolved."

And now you know "the rest of the story."

Reader Comments

No comments have been posted. Be the first!

Other Stories With Comments:
Article	Comments
The Office Cat	2
Neighborhood vandalism is out of control	1
The Office Cat	1
Drug problem growing; little is being done	1
The Office Cat	1
Family escapes death in semi hit-and-run	1
Feed a family of four for $10 a week	1