In 1984 I took an oddball part-time summer job with a company that created newspaper indexes. My first task every morning was to call an obscure office at The New York Times.
How many dots? I would ask.
The voice on the other end would give me a number ranging from zero to four, and occasionally—rare excitement—no dots but one to four dashes.
Thanks, I would say, talk to you tomorrow, and hang up.
The hoops I had to go through to do get these indexes made now seem impossibly roundabout and old-fashioned, but the indexes I helped create also anticipated the aggregated, connected, tech-dependent way we all live now. That job became such a godsend I ended up keeping it for 16 years. I feel compelled to honor it now, in a print newspaper, because I have such a bad feeling in my gut thinking about The Atlanta Journal-Constitution phasing out its print edition. I fear many other major dailies, already emaciated and unable to keep up with the pace of the news, will follow suit.
My employer was Information Access Company, based in northern California. It was a division of a then little-known publisher called Ziff-Davis, based in Manhattan, like me. IAC created daily databases of articles from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and other publications for use in libraries. The only trouble was my colleagues out west didn’t have same-day access to the late edition of the Times and the Journal.
This is where those dots and dashes and my fingers and I came in. The Times printing presses were on West 43 Street then, and they often churned out multiple late city editions. Next to the paper’s volume number on the top left of page one was a secret code. Four dots: first late edition. For each subsequent edition printed, a dot was removed. No dots meant it was the fifth late edition. On a day with huge late-breaking news, for every edition after that, they added a dash, sometimes up to four. (You can still see the four dots now, but they’re vestigial; there’s only one late edition.)
I had to find a copy of the latest edition, and there was no telling who might have it. I was a grad student at Columbia then and would bike from my dorm room at International House in Morningside Heights down to Ziff-Davis at 1 Park Avenue, stopping at newsstands along the way. The bustling newsstand inside the Empire State Building was a good source, but slow because I had to lock my bike. In later years, when I moved to the West Village, I became buddies with the guys at Wendell’s, the local newsstand, hanging out in the early morning waiting for the papers to be delivered. Wendell’s is now Casa Magazines, one of the last newsstands standing.
As the company’s sole East Coast employee, I had been assigned a tiny, windowless room at 1 Park Avenue and a one-piece proto-computer that had only three simple functions. I powered up the machine via a complicated series of codes. I typed the author’s last name, headline and page number of every article in the Times and the Wall Street Journal (which, thank heaven, printed only one edition), then sorted the list alphabetically. Then, via a different set of codes, most of the time I succeeded in sending it all electronically to my colleague Leona in Foster City. When the tech failed, Leona and I would do the work together on the phone. She would read me a headline in her national edition and I’d rifle through the pages of my paper to tell her what page it was on. I marked up the discrepancies with a red wax pencil and three times a week FedExed her the papers for cross-referencing.
Looking for missing copies
Sometimes the hunt for the latest edition grew epic. I had to find and type the Saturday and certain sections of the Sunday Times. This led to much anxiety when I went away for the weekend, which I did a lot in those years. Luckily my boyfriend was not just a fellow bicyclist but a talented trespasser and cat burglar. Late Sunday afternoons often found us scouring basements and even trash cans for late editions. One post-Thanksgiving Sunday we got so desperate we biked down to the 43rd Street printing presses, where a garage door had been left open. We climbed onto an inky second-floor catwalk and found some of the papers, along with a lot of loose change. We then hustled to a lot off 11th Avenue where The Times parked its trucks. No humans to stop us, just—I kid you not—snarling pit bulls guarding the property. As fast as we could, we tried the doors of the trucks and ransacked the unlocked ones and found the rest of the late editions.
Meanwhile, thanks to Wang, Compaq and the first Macs, personal computers were rapidly becoming a thing. Ziff-Davis, publisher of PC Magazine and other tech titles, grew. Four or five times I went in to work in the morning to find that someone else had taken over my seemingly unoccupied office and my meager belongings were nowhere in sight. I would storm into Office Services to complain. Finally the staff adopted me as one of their own. This way, they said, you’ll always know where your office is. It so happened that the Murdoch Corporation had its offices across the hall. Little did we know that in those early years after buying out 20th Century Fox they were laying the groundwork for one of the biggest disruptions—to put it mildly—ever to hit the information business: Fox News.
By 1990, when the cat burglar and I got married, the office services staff threw me a shower and came to our wedding. That was also the year we got our first home computer, a beige behemoth with a monitor practically as deep as a window AC unit. When my two kids were born, the company let me work from home for a while, though when they were toddlers I had to return to the office. I went in so early the heat wasn’t on yet and I had to grope for the light switches. For a terrible period they made me go down to Wall Street every week (hoisting a kid in a stroller up and down the subway steps) to pick up a trade journal called Chemical Marketing Reporter and mail it to them. I have no idea why this was so imperative.
That first work computer gave way to a PC with WordPerfect (shift + F7 = print) and then Lotus Notes. The miserable era of fallible floppy disks followed, and years spent standing over a poky fax machine. I found a job evaluation form I filled out in 1996 that said I planned to become more comfortable using email and planned to learn the new Voyager system (whatever that was).
Over time I inevitably got quicker, compressing the work into fewer hours. They still paid me at the same rate, and I earned it, not just from dodging snarling dogs. I couldn’t take a day off unless I had someone to cover for me, and I was responsible for all recruitment and training. In appreciation, twice IAC flew me to California for their Christmas party, where I was treated like royalty. I also got to attend fancy Ziff-Davis Christmas parties in those heady years of the first tech boom.
When they finally laid me off in 2000, it wasn’t because my California colleagues didn’t need my services anymore; it was because of corporate cutbacks when IAC merged with The Gale Group.
My colleagues all sent heartfelt condolence notes.
I was bereft too. It was a great gig. It subsidized my lean times as a freelance magazine writer. It let me take creative writing classes on the side and spend many days with the kids at Bleecker Street playground. And I got to spend my early mornings with two of the best papers in the nation.
I just excavated one of my Times article lists among some ancient WordPerfect files I didn’t even know I still had. Here’s some of the news from the gray lady that random Friday, September 17, 1997: Garment Shops Found to Break Wage Laws; Sulzberger Passes Leadership of Times; Successful Births Reported with Frozen Human Eggs; James Michener Dies; For Giuliani, Ethnic Tone Emerging.
I guess old news always seems quaint: they still ran a bridge column then, and the front page was mostly blessedly dull. Now the Times print edition is smaller in every way: never more than six articles on page one, a chunk of page three given over to the kind of lifestyle advice that used to be the province of women’s magazines, color photos that take up the whole first page of many Sunday sections, the daily book review replaced with video-game and stand-up comedy reviews, scant local news. It would be quicker to type it all out every morning, but it sure would be depressing.
