Computers

News workers have used computers in and out of newsrooms since the early Cold War. And most newsrooms “computerized” by the end of the 1980s – i.e., adopted computers for daily reporting use – in publications big and small in many developed countries around the world. This chapter focuses on how journalists integrated computing into their work routines, with a special focus on Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Like other white-collar industries, including banking, journalism experimented with computer mainframes in the 1950s and 1960s moved toward the use of shared (closet-sized) minicomputers in the 1970s, and finally jumped to the use of microcomputers (individual desktops) in the 1980s. Broadly, computer use by editors and reporters moved from production tasks such as pagination and hyphenation to optical character-scan recognition (OCR), early spell-checking- and layout-software – and so from closed, centralized, and proprietary (and thus expensive) content management system (CMS) – to the more ersatz, decentralized, and off-the-shelf desktops used for research and writing. This process happened right on through the arrival of the civilian internet in the 1990s, where this chapter leaves off.