Latest news with #Olivetti
New Straits Times
15-07-2025
- New Straits Times
#NST180years: Transformed by a powerful evolution
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.
Los Angeles Times
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
10 books to read in July
Critic Bethanne Patrick recommends 10 promising titles, fiction and nonfiction, to consider for your July reading list. It's officially beach-reads season: Whether you do your reading outdoors or inside in air-conditioned comfort, July's hot new releases will help you stay cool. Topics range from analog memories of Golden Age Hollywood to a maverick female athlete. Happy reading! In Pursuit of Beauty: A Novel By Gary BaumBlackstone: 256 pages, $29(July 1) Baum, a journalist for the Hollywood Reporter, draws on knowledge he has gleaned about cosmetic surgery, the profession of his protagonist, Dr. Roya Delshad. Dr. Delshad, who is multiracial and once supposedly plain, remakes herself into a glorious bombshell — but then lands in prison. She's agreed to consider interviews with a ghostwriter named Wes Easton, who will soon discover why she's called 'the Robin Hood of Roxbury Drive.' Typewriter Beach: A Novel By Meg Waite ClaytonHarper: 320 pages, $30(July 1) Like the carriage of a well-oiled Olivetti, this novel moves between Carmel and Hollywood, in two different centuries, with ease. In 1957, actress Isabella Giori hopes to land a career-making role in a Hitchcock film; when her circumstances change and she winds up secluded in a tiny cottage in Carmel-on-the-Sea, a blacklisted emigre screenwriter named Léon Chazan saves her. In 2018, his screenwriter granddaughter finally learns how and why. Vera, or Faith: A Novel By Gary ShteyngartRandom House: 256 pages, $28(July 8) Vera, the child narrator of this wry and relevant new novel from Shteyngart ('Our Country Friends'), brings a half-Korean heritage to the Russian-Jewish-WASP Bradford-Shmulkin family. Between Daddy, Anne Mom, and her longing for her unknown bio Mom Mom, Vera has a lot to handle, while all she really wants is to help her dad and stepmom stay married — and to make a friend at school. It's a must-read. Mendell Station: A Novel By J. B. HwangBloomsbury: 208 pages, $27(July 22) In the wake of her best friend Esther's 2020 death from COVID-19, Miriam loses faith in almost everything, including the God that made her job teaching Christian scripture at a San Francisco private school bearable. She quits and takes a job as a mail carrier (as the author also did), not only finding moments of grace from neighborhood to neighborhood but also writing letters to Esther in an effort to understand the childhood difficulties that bonded them. Necessary Fiction: A Novel By Eloghosa OsundeRiverhead: 320 pages, $28(July 22) The title tells so much about how queer people must live in Nigeria, and so does the structure: Osunde ('Vagabonds!') calls it a novel, although its chapters read more like short stories. If it doesn't hang together like a traditional novel, that may be part of the point. Characters like May, struggling with gender identity, or Ziz, a gay man in Lagos, know that their identities don't always hang together in traditional ways — and that's definitely the point. The CIA Book Club: The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War With Forbidden Literature By Charlie EnglishRandom House: 384 pages, $35(July 1) Decades of Cold War espionage between the United States and the Soviet Union included programs that leveraged cultural media. The Central Intelligence Agency's Manhattan-based 'book club' office was run by an emigre from Romania named George Midden, who managed to send 10 million books behind the Iron Curtain. Some of them were serious tomes, yes, but there were Agatha Christie novels, Orwell's '1984' and art books too. The Hiroshima Men: The Quest to Build the Atomic Bomb, and the Fateful Decision to Use It By Iain MacGregorScribner: 384 pages, $32(July 8) Crucially, MacGregor's painstakingly researched history of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan at the end of World War II includes Japanese perspectives. The historian ('Checkpoint Charlie') treats the atomic bomb more as a weapon of mass murder and less as a scientific breakthrough, while managing to convey the urgency behind its development for the Allied forces. On Her Game: Caitlin Clark and the Revolution in Women's Sports By Christine BrennanScribner: 272 pages, $30(July 8) Let this sink in (basketball pun very much intended): Caitlin Clark has scored more points than any player in major college basketball history. Not just the female players — the male players too. Now that she's in the WNBA as a rookie for the Indiana Fever, Clark is attracting the kind of fan base once reserved for male basketball stars like Michael Jordan and LeBron James. Brennan's longtime coverage of Clark's career makes this book a slam dunk. Strata: Stories From Deep Time By Laura PoppickW. W. Norton & Co.: 288 pages, $30(July 15) Each stratum, or layer, of our planet tells a story. Science writer Poppick explains what those millions of strata can tell us about four instances that changed life dramatically, from oxygen entering the atmosphere all the way to the dinosaur era. Ultimately, she argues that these strata show us that when stressed, the earth reacts by changing and moving toward stability. It's a fascinating peek into the globe's core that might offer clues about sustainability. The Feather Detective: Mystery, Mayhem, and the Magnificent Life of Roxie Laybourne By Chris SweeneyAvid Reader Press: 320 pages, $30(July 22) The once-unassuming Roxie Laybourne became the world's first forensic ornithologist in 1960, when the FAA asked the Smithsonian — where Laybourne was an avian taxidermist — to help them identify shredded feathers from a fatal airplane crash in Boston. She analyzed specimens that contributed to arrests in racial attacks, as well as in catching game poachers and preventing deaths of fighter pilots. In her way, Laybourne was a badass.
Scoop
30-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Scoop
Prepare To Fall In Love: Trent Dalton's Love Stories Comes To The Civic, Auckland, This October
Press Release – 818. Auckland Live, in association with Auckland Writers Festival, proudly presents the New Zealand exclusive season of Love Stories — the critically acclaimed stage sensation by Trent Dalton, direct from standing ovations and five-star raves in Australia. This heart-expanding theatrical gem plays just five performances at The Civic, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, from Thursday 16 October to Sunday 19 October. Adapted for the stage by award-winning playwright Tim McGarry and directed by Sam Strong (the creative team behind the smash-hit page-to-stage adaptation of Boy Swallows Universe), Love Stories invites audiences into Dalton's world: a city street corner, a battered Olivetti typewriter, and a single question posed to strangers passing by – ' Can you please tell me a love story?' ' In a time when we need joy more than ever, Love Stories lifts the spirit.' – Arts Hub From strangers to soulmates, parents to children, friends to lifelong companions, the stories collected and celebrated in this remarkable production traverse the full spectrum of human love. Weaving real-life encounters with music, laughter, movement, and tenderness, Love Stories is an unforgettable tribute to the beauty, fragility, and fierce resilience of the human heart. 'It dives into the chaos of love – the joy, the pain, the laughter, the heartbreak … sending you back to the streets feeling just a little more alive' – The Guardian Trent Dalton reflected on the production's journey from the streets of Brisbane to The Civic in Auckland: 'Early this year, the extraordinary gang from Auckland Live walked me into that hallowed Civic theatre in the heart of that glorious city. They showed me exactly what it will feel like to walk into Love Stories come showtime. The theatre ceiling literally shimmered with a blanket of stars. That theatre – that city, their writer's festival – embodies everything the play is about … community, dreams, storytelling, connection, love in all its tricky and wondrous forms. I kinda lost my mind with the joy and possibility of it all. It's a dream come true for me, to create a piece of art that adds to a history of NZ culture – theatre, books, film, music, art – that has inspired me since I was a teenage writer wannabe who could only dream of having something he wrote travelling across the ditch, all the way to paradise. Thank you Auckland Live, from the bottom of my heart. And thank you dear Auckland!' Daniel Clarke, Director of Performing Arts at Tātaki Auckland Unlimited, leading Auckland Live commented: 'I saw the very first pitch of this work at idea stage and knew that it would be a winner. And it has been. Thousands of people across Australia have seen this play since its world premiere at Brisbane Festival. This is a beautiful work, full of heart and innovatively staged; we can't wait to share this stunning production with the audiences of Aotearoa. It is the perfect spring show – love will be in the air!' Love Stories was originally commissioned and produced by Brisbane Festival and Queensland Performing Arts Centre. The production features additional writing and story by Trent Dalton and Fiona Franzmann, with choreography by Nerida Matthaei, design by Renee Mulder, lighting by Ben Hughes, and original music and sound design by Stephen Francis. Don't miss this moving celebration of humanity, connection, and the stories that bind us. Presales are on now, ahead of the general onsale on Thu 3 July, 9 AM. With just five performances, audiences are encouraged to book tickets early to secure their seats for this strictly limited season. For more information, go to Auckland Live is the premiere organisation for performing arts, culture, entertainment and events in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. As Aotearoa New Zealand's largest performing arts entity, we proudly present a programme of live arts and entertainment across our iconic venues: Aotea Centre, The Civic, Auckland Town Hall, The Cloud, Shed 10, Viaduct Events Centre, Bruce Mason Centre, and Aotea Square. Auckland Live is part of Tātaki Auckland Unlimited, a Council-Controlled Organisation.
Scoop
30-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Scoop
Prepare To Fall In Love: Trent Dalton's Love Stories Comes To The Civic, Auckland, This October
Auckland Live, in association with Auckland Writers Festival, proudly presents the New Zealand exclusive season of Love Stories — the critically acclaimed stage sensation by Trent Dalton, direct from standing ovations and five-star raves in Australia. This heart-expanding theatrical gem plays just five performances at The Civic, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, from Thursday 16 October to Sunday 19 October. Adapted for the stage by award-winning playwright Tim McGarry and directed by Sam Strong (the creative team behind the smash-hit page-to-stage adaptation of Boy Swallows Universe), Love Stories invites audiences into Dalton's world: a city street corner, a battered Olivetti typewriter, and a single question posed to strangers passing by - ' Can you please tell me a love story?' ' In a time when we need joy more than ever, Love Stories lifts the spirit.' - Arts Hub From strangers to soulmates, parents to children, friends to lifelong companions, the stories collected and celebrated in this remarkable production traverse the full spectrum of human love. Weaving real-life encounters with music, laughter, movement, and tenderness, Love Stories is an unforgettable tribute to the beauty, fragility, and fierce resilience of the human heart. 'It dives into the chaos of love – the joy, the pain, the laughter, the heartbreak ... sending you back to the streets feeling just a little more alive' - The Guardian Trent Dalton reflected on the production's journey from the streets of Brisbane to The Civic in Auckland: 'Early this year, the extraordinary gang from Auckland Live walked me into that hallowed Civic theatre in the heart of that glorious city. They showed me exactly what it will feel like to walk into Love Stories come showtime. The theatre ceiling literally shimmered with a blanket of stars. That theatre - that city, their writer's festival - embodies everything the play is about … community, dreams, storytelling, connection, love in all its tricky and wondrous forms. I kinda lost my mind with the joy and possibility of it all. It's a dream come true for me, to create a piece of art that adds to a history of NZ culture - theatre, books, film, music, art - that has inspired me since I was a teenage writer wannabe who could only dream of having something he wrote travelling across the ditch, all the way to paradise. Thank you Auckland Live, from the bottom of my heart. And thank you dear Auckland!' Daniel Clarke, Director of Performing Arts at Tātaki Auckland Unlimited, leading Auckland Live commented: 'I saw the very first pitch of this work at idea stage and knew that it would be a winner. And it has been. Thousands of people across Australia have seen this play since its world premiere at Brisbane Festival. This is a beautiful work, full of heart and innovatively staged; we can't wait to share this stunning production with the audiences of Aotearoa. It is the perfect spring show - love will be in the air!' Love Stories was originally commissioned and produced by Brisbane Festival and Queensland Performing Arts Centre. The production features additional writing and story by Trent Dalton and Fiona Franzmann, with choreography by Nerida Matthaei, design by Renee Mulder, lighting by Ben Hughes, and original music and sound design by Stephen Francis. Don't miss this moving celebration of humanity, connection, and the stories that bind us. Presales are on now, ahead of the general onsale on Thu 3 July, 9 AM. With just five performances, audiences are encouraged to book tickets early to secure their seats for this strictly limited season. For more information, go to Auckland Live is the premiere organisation for performing arts, culture, entertainment and events in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. As Aotearoa New Zealand's largest performing arts entity, we proudly present a programme of live arts and entertainment across our iconic venues: Aotea Centre, The Civic, Auckland Town Hall, The Cloud, Shed 10, Viaduct Events Centre, Bruce Mason Centre, and Aotea Square. Auckland Live is part of Tātaki Auckland Unlimited, a Council-Controlled Organisation.
Sydney Morning Herald
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
My suburb is the beating cauliflower heart of Melbourne's gluten-free belt
Our south-and western border is the Merri Creek, and although Clifton Hill and Fitzroy North can claim to have prettier aspects, we get to enjoy it amidst the roar of trucks on Heidelberg Road. If the creek ever floods, it's the hardy folk of Westgarth who live on the flood plain. Is Westgarth part of Northcote? In the old Melway, Westgarth looked to be its own suburb. But over at Australia Post, they won't give Westgarth a postcode, smudging it into 3070. So as much as some renegade Westgarthians might want to secede, hogging the Bill Lawry Oval and the Merri footbridge for themselves, we keep Westgarth in the fold. Like Australia needs Western Australia for its iron ore, we need Westgarth for its cinema, which is a grand, art nouveau beauty at the base of Ruckers Hill. We also need it for its famous wholefoods store, Terra Madre, which is where I go to shop if I want to feel like a marble being tilted around a maze where the walls are made entirely of red lentils. There is a way out, I promise, and you can reward yourself at checkout with an impulse buy of Northcote's finest carob. We are famous for our cafe culture, think Vienna around the turn of the century, or Paris during the Enlightenment, except the talk around here is all about the design of the next tattoo sleeve, or Pokey Le Farge's tour dates. Pokey is a randomly selected, excellent but little-known touring artist who blew my mind with a show at the Northcote Social Club six years ago. That sort of thing happens in the live music hub that is 3070. It's even better now that the Northcote Theatre has been renovated. Every weekend, a queue snakes around the corner into Bastings Street, the ages and dress of the gig goers varying with the shades and genres of who's playing. For some decades, Northcote was thought of as a hotbed of creativity, a place for artists, musicians and writers. I do love that our local primary school, Westgarth Primary, has an 'Idol night' that is a no-kids-allowed karaoke fundraiser extravaganza at which parents sing along with a 10-piece band. In the first years I was involved, Ben Ely from Regurgitator was on bass. I dressed up as Piggy Pop (fat Iggy Pop) with drawn-on abs and sang Lust for Life. It was ridiculous, Ben and I collaborating on a musical performance. I wondered if it would happen in other suburbs of Melbourne. It felt very Northcote. Loading Is Northcote still a place for artists? Rising property prices have changed things considerably, although I'm pleased to report that I'm writing this article on an Olivetti typewriter at a High Street whiskey bar that also stocks the complete works of James Joyce. The clack of the keys is putting everybody off their $22 a pop whiskey mules. But there is still a community feel to the suburb, a sense that we can all come together in the car park of the new aquatic centre and circle unsuccessfully for a park together. Our street has a WhatsApp group, where we find out who has an overabundance of quinces or which neighbour had what car stolen overnight. We even have an Oxford Street Tree Art exhibition, organised by Matt at number 19, who gets us all to dress up our street trees. My best effort was to put a shopping trolley around a trunk, so it looked like the tree was growing through the middle of it. Thank you Martin, at number six, for your angle grinder. My favourite community activity is visiting Dog Park, which I can't talk too much about because our dog park is not actually a dog park, and I don't want to alert the rangers. We also have a dog called Ranger at Dog Park, so if a ranger actually comes, and someone yells 'Ranger!' — look it's all going to be very confusing. What we need at this point is some giant wooden dog, preferably with eyes that flash red when someone is coming.
