The Good Old, Old Days and the Merely Good Old Days in the Newspaper Office

In the photograph on the left above, editor Erwin Craighead works at his desk in The Mobile Register in 1897. (Photo courtesy of the Doy Leale McCall Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of South Alabama.)

About 90 years later, Press Register photographer Ron Colquitt snapped the photo on the right of me toiling away at my editorial page editor job on The Mobile Press.

Craighead composed his editorials by longhand, while I wrote mine on a computer. But otherwise, Craighead would have found much that was familiar about the newspaper office of the 1980s.

How much will we old timers find familiar about the digital newspaper office?