In the late 1980s, I was an editor for the Plant, the student newspaper at Dawson College, in Montreal. The operation was small but drew the devotion of a squad of young journalists and photographers—most of whom made the job the biggest thing in their lives.
Then, as now, the role required tech. Not a laptop or a cellphone: an Exacto knife. That’s because we produced our stories by gluing them onto a board. It was called paste-up. You stood in front of an easel, cut the type up into strips, rearranged it into columns on a grid. Every week, we crammed into a tiny office and put out a paper with sticky fingers. We covered student elections, funding allocations, dubious university policies. And when I say “covered,” I mean we did it zealously, opinionatedly, often while being underfed, more often hungover.
