friday, march 12, 2004
past and now and future and everything
i’ve been at mediamorphosis all morning. it’s been so interesting and new and just way cool. the blog is great! i had to leave at lunch though, since i have community college classes from 3:30 pm to 7:30 pm, and i can’t miss those. in the car from newport to los angeles, my mom and i were talking…
she said, “we go back generations in the newspaper business - really, maybe 200 years.” my family has been involved in the production of the news for a long time. typesetting, editing, television, and now blogs.
my maternal grandmother’s family members were typesetters in new york and new jersey.
my great-grandma, oldest of five children, had to quit school in eighth grade to support her family. she worked in the print shop as a copyeditor.
during the great depression, my grandma’s family did ok because my great-grandfather was the foreman of a print shop, and got everyone jobs there - “even in a depression, people need to pay 5 cents to get a newspaper and read the classified section”. there’s only one of those print shop apprentices still living, and he’s 89 - my great-uncle allen.
my grandfather was a technical writer and editor and oversaw the bell system technical journal in the 1960s. my mom said “all these computer nerds would love jobs in the old bell labs.”
when my mom was a little girl, my grandma told her that she had type lice on her head and printer’s ink in her veins.
my mom worked in television production for the MacNeil/Lehrer Report (now The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer) in the late 1970s.
my dad wrote a book. (that’s not quite newspaper-related, but still publishing.) when i was little, there was an unlimited source of drawing paper because my dad’s friend would bring over boxes of the old manuscripts of his books - as much paper as we wanted. one side with the rest is silence: death as annilation in the english renaissance, the other side with drawings in crayon. my great-grandmother also wrote a book.
now, i’m a blogger at this conference and we’re trying to figure out the future of all this newspaper blog social technology finance distribution attribution stuff.
printer’s ink in my veins, type lice in my head, html structure, and css skin…
