When students, staff and faculty walk into San José State’s Spartan Daily newsroom today, they are met with a sizable collection of computer monitors, DSLR cameras, and smartphones lying at the sides of reporters.
Decades ago, this was not how the room looked, according to Spartan Daily alum David Willman.
With 90 years of history, the Spartan Daily has provided content in both online and print since 1934, displaying a plethora of eras in technology.
Willman, who graduated in 1977 and is currently an investigative reporter for The Washington Post, said when he was working on the school’s paper, they were only using typewriters.
“The noise and cacophony we experienced was a totally different culture,” Willman said. “We also worked with carbons to preserve a copy of what we wrote.”
Carbon copying was a process in which a message written on the top sheet of a paper was simultaneously transmitted through a thin sheet of carbon-treated paper underneath to create a copy on a bottom page, according to a Oct. 7, 2018 article from CBS News.
Newsrooms around the world also embraced the development of the typewriter, allowing journalists to produce articles in a quicker, clearer and more accurate manner, according to the LA Historia Society webpage.
Marcos Bretón, opinion editor and overseer of The Sacramento Bee’s editorial board, said he remembers what the newsroom looked like when he was both a reporter and then an editor in fall 1985.
Bretón said in 1985, the world was moving away from typewriters and towards computers.
“They were these big, bulky things that sat on our desks,” Bretón said. “Now when I tell my kids about it, they just think it’s science fiction.”
While gray Macbooks and wireless mics sit on the desks of editors in the newsroom today, Bretón said he and the other reporters made the most of these ‘bulky’ computers despite their complications.
He said he and other reporters wrote on what could best be described as word processors.
Word processing could be described as physical devices that stored information rather than singular apps that allowed reporters to type, according to an Aug. 18, 2016 article from Tedium.
“Obviously, there was no email at this point, so all you could do was create a file and then write in the file,” Bretón said.
Marc Spears, senior NBA writer for ESPN’s Andscape, said he got his first email while attending SJSU and being on the Spartan Daily in 1994.
Spears said when it was introduced to the world, he thought it was corny and would have rather made a phone call than send one.
“At the time, it didn’t really make sense to me – the whole email thing,” Spears said. “Then I realized people could send me information through an email instead of me waiting at a fax machine all day.”
Spears, who was mainly writing sports stories for the Spartan Daily, said today it is easy for reporters to reach out to people and get the statistics they need for stories.
He said when he talked to the coach of a team on the radio, he would use his tape recorder and track his quotes.
“I would be sitting in my car writing the story as the game was going along, and would get faxed quotes from the players and coaches,” he said.
With a rise in technological advancement, sports journalism has had to constantly adapt, but continues to gain widespread coverage across print and digital platforms, according to a June 25, 2018 article from the Oxford University Press.
Zoom, an online video conferencing and collaborative platform, allows individuals today to make phone calls or join meetings remotely with one another, according to Lifewire.
Otter.ai, an artificial intelligence application, generates shareable, recorded notes that create transcriptions and speaker identifications, according to Okta.
Sarah Klieves, executive producer at NBC Bay Area, said with such AI apps and websites coming up, she is trying to be cautious about trusting certain services.
Klieves, who was on the Spartan Daily from 2017 to 2019, said she remembers late nights in the newsroom where she and other reporters would try their best to have articles published by midnight.
Klieves also said today, she personally only looks to buy a physical newspaper when she is at the airport, yet is subscribed to a lot of organizations online.
“Just looking to evolve and tell stories in different ways is great for the industry as a whole,” she said.
Throughout its history, eight alumni journalists have been awarded with Pulitzer Prizes on Spartan Daily— most recently, Associated Press California photo editor Marcio Sanchez, according to SJSU News Center.
This does not include the more than 30 national journalism awards and 120 state awards earned by the paper’s editorial teams since 2015.
Spears said he thoroughly enjoyed his time on the paper, and made lifelong friends along the way.
“I was excited about the future that San José State and the Spartan Daily were helping me get to,” Spears said.
