Now He Pulls Data Off the Web. In 1979, It Was Clips From the ‘Morgue.’

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/27/technology/personaltech/newsroom-technology-evolved-40-years.html

Version 0 of 1.

How do New York Times journalists use technology in their jobs and in their personal lives? Steve Lohr, a technology reporter in New York, discussed the tech he’s using.

You’ve worked for The Times for nearly 40 years, so you’re like our in-house historian. Tell us a little about that history.

I joined The Times when I was 28 years old, in December 1979. I spent less than two years in New York, and then a decade as a foreign correspondent, based in Tokyo, Manila and London. Then, I did a couple of years in two editing stints, before I was able to get back to being a reporter.

Over the years, the subjects have run the gamut, including magazine profiles that ranged from the star female impersonator in Kabuki theater to Steve Jobs.

How has using technology to report for The Times changed for you over the years?

When I started at The Times, nothing was online. To research a story, you started by going to the “morgue,” a large room where people cut out old stories and placed them in row after row of file drawers, grouped by subject.

The files weren’t just Times articles. They often included pieces from The New Yorker, Life, Esquire, New York and elsewhere.

Personal computers were hobbyist curiosities, not yet used in newsrooms. We wrote on terminals linked to a central computer. The terminals were shared, two for every four reporters. Sometimes, that created problems.

The most territorial reporters took a squatter’s rights approach — get on a terminal and camp out, no matter how distant their deadline. Rather than fight, I managed to get a password for signing onto any terminal in the building. So I’d just find an open terminal in some other part of the newsroom. But that meant you were away from your phone. No cellphones then.

In 1980, there was a crash in the silver market that shook Wall Street. I was writing the front-page story for the next day. After filing my story from a terminal in the culture department, I got back to my desk and had three telephone messages from G. William Miller, the Treasury secretary at the time. I missed the calls.

When I went to Tokyo, it was back to a typewriter and a small Underwood portable, which was the laptop of its day. We wrote stories, 200 words on a page, and hand-delivered them to the Reuters office across town, to be cabled to New York. Later, we moved to small word-processing computers — Tandy 100s and then Tandy 200s, with phone couplers for the modem connections. In some places, the phone service wasn’t good enough to transmit by modem. Then, you’d just call in your story and dictate it to the Times phone room.

Then came the internet era. How did that change how you report?

The internet, put simply, is a low-cost communications network. Everything else, like the web, builds on top of that. And having so much information online can be a gold mine for reporting. In my case, I report on technology and economics these days.

Silicon Valley is a caldron of innovation. But all the big issues surrounding technology’s impact on the world — like automation, economic opportunity and income disparity — are playing out outside the tech hubs, across the $20 trillion American economy. Tons of research is being done on those subjects, and it’s all online — working papers from the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Social Science Research Network, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and scientific studies.

What it means is you can test your assumptions for any trend or explanatory story. Is the lively anecdote you just came across an outlier, or representative of a broader phenomenon? Early in reporting a subject, you can get an answer to the question: What story do the numbers tell you? That is a powerful tool that applies to most fields today, including journalism.

The other, similar change is in the ease, speed and cost of one-to-one communication, which is the most valuable. In one week alone this month, I never thought twice about talking to people in Germany, Israel and France, by phone or Skype. The faster, easier inexpensive communication means you can talk to far more people, wherever they are, on any given story.

To explain the difference: When I was a foreign correspondent in Japan, nearly all communication with the New York office was messages typed on paper and sent by cable. In nearly three years, I spoke by phone to the editor who was my boss only twice — and the second time was to be told to move to Manila, to cover the waning days of the Ferdinand Marcos regime.

By contrast, my 22-year-old daughter has just finished a nine-month fellowship in Russia in Nizhny Novgorod (look it up). I talked to her most every day with video, sometimes for up to an hour on weekends. All it took was a smartphone, Facebook Messenger and a decent Wi-Fi connection.

Outside of work, what tech products are you currently obsessed with?

I live in an apartment with more than 4,000 books, and yet I’ve also become a huge Kindle fan. It’s just so convenient, a library in a lightweight tablet. For big books, like William Taubman’s biography of Mikhail Gorbachev, published last year, I’ll sometimes buy both the hardcover and the digital versions. Each has its advantages.

I’m also a rapt beneficiary of the renaissance in podcasting — a classic example of technology, innovation and investment coming together to eventually get a new medium right. I listen to “The Daily” from The Times in the evening, after a day in front of a screen. If you haven’t listened to the “Caliphate” series, do yourself a favor. Admittedly, both are plugs for The Times, but both are terrific audio programs.

I like others, too. High on my list is “American History Tellers,” which began this year. The producers tap professional historians to help write the scripts for episodes on themes — the Cold War, Prohibition, the Age of Jackson and the Space Race. The host is Lindsay Graham. (“No, not that Lindsey Graham,” he’ll remind listeners.) This Mr. Graham is a marketing director at Southern Methodist University, and a podcast entrepreneur.