#NST180years: Transformed by a powerful evolution

New Straits Times

15-07-2025

ON the production floor of the New Straits Times in the late 1980s, "paste-up men" wielding razor-sharp box cutters and straight aluminium rulers would cut strips of wax-coated bromide paper with the speed and precision of a CNC machine, before placing them on layout sheets.
The production editor — a picture of calm — would pace between rows of brightly lit layout tables, arms folded, one eye scanning the pages, the other cocked on his Seiko timepiece, as sub-editors scurried about making last-minute changes.
The finished pages would be laid out on the offstone table. Editors and production supervisors did the last checks, signed off the pages and declared them "offstoned" — no more changes and ready for the plate.
Today, everything is digitally done through the magic of ones and zeros. The paste-up men, their box cutters, bromide paper, wax baths and layout tables have become ghosts of a bygone era.
Word-processing and editing were done on Kodak's ATEX machines — cast-iron framed keyboards with high-impact plastic key tabs. Trash bins overflowed with torn carbon paper, crumpled foolscap sheets and reams of typewriter ribbons.
The newsroom pulsed with the syncopated, clackety-clack sing-song of Olivetti typewriters as reporters raced to meet their deadlines.
These days, fingers dance effortlessly across keyboards and smartphones. Data is stored digitally, captured on vast servers. Stories can be tweaked, tracked and kept for months.
Editors can also see how stories perform on the World Wide Web in real time. If they are sluggish, they can be taken down, rewritten and re-sold — something impossible with traditional print.
If you covered crime back then, you'd do the rounds — morgues, hospitals, fire and police stations — to build contacts. People skills mattered, and you were bound to get scoops if you showed up with a roll of free NSTs under your arm and spread them around like Father Christmas... more so if you arrived with teh O ais, ikat tepi, and roti canai.
In Balai Berita, a crime reporter monitored the wireless set that picked up police transmissions. The NST crime boys were often ahead of the game, showing up at crime scenes long before the competition.
Bukit Aman's ruffled feathers would be soothed by the imposing crime editor, Rudy Beltran, himself a retired cop and an accomplished pianist.
Today, the proliferation of WhatsApp groups has made wireless sets irrelevant. Information moves at the speed of thought. Newsrooms no longer wait for dispatches crackling over the radio or rely on runners dashing in with scribbled updates. Details, photos and videos arrive instantly, often before official confirmation.
On the flipside, scoops — the lifeblood of newspapers — have become harder to secure. When everyone shares everything in group chats, exclusivity is lost.
A tip-off that once landed on a single editor's desk now reaches dozens of reporters at the same time. The playing field has levelled, but at the cost of the thrill of the hunt. Technology has democratised information — but it has also made genuine exclusives rarer.
Today, journalists armed with a smartphone can write and edit a story, take high-definition photos, record a stand-upper and send a complete package back to the newsroom, each piece tailored for specific platforms — print, online and social media.
A photographer with a DSLR smaller than a lunch box can shoot thousands of high-resolution images and broadcast-quality 4K videos. Where it once took a team from different departments to assemble a story, now a good reporter can do it alone.
This seismic shift began in the mid-2000s with the digital age. The Internet, once shackled by anaemic dial-up speeds and anorexic bandwidth, became unstoppable.
The NST had the answer in this powerful new tool, begging the question — how to fully harness it. Far from being just an enabler, digital technology was a game-changer.
It allowed the NST to evolve into a fully integrated news organisation, covering a broad spectrum — from traditional print to online, social media, podcasts, education and television. In so doing, it has become more than just a newspaper — it has grown into one of the world's largest repositories of human history.
And it continues to reinvent itself, reshaping how we consume news and information.
Some practices have been consigned to the scrap heap of history. But certain things — like the chase for a scoop, the ironclad commitment to ethics and integrity, the hunt for that perfect money shot — still continue to this day, 180 years later.