Technology boosts Scopes, Dover ID coverage
In covering the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925, the Gazette and Daily in York made its first extensive use of photographs delivered via a phone line.
The daily newspaper played with its news technology by running a July 1 photograph of Santa Barbara, damaged by an earthquake two days earlier.
So when the Tennessee trial began a week later, the morning daily was ready to harvest photos from the phone wire, called “wire photos.”
The Gazette and Daily ran about 10 single photos or photo packages of the trial.
When state’s attorney William Jennings Bryan died shortly after the trial, the newspaper ran a photo of his funeral and a photo package consisting of at least four wire photos including a remarkable photo of the house where Bryan died. Some editor had placed crosses on the picture at the place where Bryan was “lying when the end came‿ and the porch where his wife was sitting when informed of her husband’s death.
Eighty years later, technology played a major role in news coverage of the federal judge’s decision in the Dover ID case… .
This week, the Daily Record/Sunday News, successor to the Gazette and Daily, used its Web pages to immediately report the news, post the judge’s opinion and provide Associated Press coverage of the national impact.
It also created on-line: a forum for readers to register their opinions, this blog to post commentary and sought letters to the editor for publication in the newspaper.
Of course, the newspaper published six pages of coverage the next day.
The summary point is that the York Daily Record/Sunday News is increasingly turning to publication between print cycles via the Web. This trend is going on nationally as one-time print journalists are using the reporting and delivery practices long-held by radio and television journalists.
In fact, we’ve been publishing between cycles for 10 years now — introducing our Web site, www.ydr.com during the January 1996 blizzard.
