Dirty little secrets of the newspaper biz

(Photo by Jack Haley, Messenger/Post.)

“Who is that gentleman on the front page of my Friday Messenger?” I asked myself.
“He looks familiar.”
“Jim Terwilliger” (“trr-WILL-eee-grr”), the caption said.
Actually “Jm,” I minor typo I consider inconsequential, since I used to work at the Messenger.
Minor except to the tub-thumping Limbaugh Conservative crowd.
Noisy accusations of “stupidity” and “incompetence” and “fevered agenda.”
Terwilliger was one of our financial advice columnists.
He worked at Canandaigua National Bank, their “Wealth Strategies Group.” Probably still does.
Every Sunday the Messenger ran a column of locally written financial advice, and Terwilliger was our best source.
We had others, of course, but they weren't as regular as Terwilliger.
One other was pretty regular, but his column was “boilerplate;” i.e. not locally written.
They were written by minions in New York City.
His columns were web-printouts.
They even had the web-address on them.
I'd crank that web-address into my Internet browser, and there would be the column.
Boom-zoom; copy/paste, ready-to-print.
Slam-dunk easy, but not locally written.
Jim would e-mail me his latest column as a Word®-attachment.
All I had was Word 6.0; ancient.
His columns opened as “text-only.”
All Jim's bullets and formatting had been vaporized.
Jim would call our head-honcho, who at that time was George Ewing, Jr.
“When are you gonna get that poor guy a more recent version of Word?”
I had a work-around.
I'd e-mail his columns home, where I had Word-98.
It would open all Jim's formatting.
I'd print it, and then massage his column for printing in the Messenger — a couple “find/replaces.”
What that involved was Quark®-tags to do Jim's formatting. I think those Quark-tags were HTML tags. I had macros to fiddle.
Completed, I'd e-mail it back.
I had taken it upon myself to get a weekly locally-written financial advice column in the Messenger, and Jim was my best contributor.
We ran everything he sent.
The article says in 1952 he was age-9.
Which makes him a year older than me.
In 1952 I was age-8.

• The “Messenger” (“mighty Mezz”) is the Canandaigua Daily-Messenger newspaper, from where I retired over four years ago. Best job I ever had. (“Canandaigua” [“cannon-DAY-gwuh”] is a small city nearby where we live in Western NY. The city is also within a rural town called “Canandaigua.” The name is Indian, and means “Chosen Spot.” —It’s about 15 miles away.) —As a retiree I get the Messenger free. (“ Messenger/Post” because the Messenger bought all the Post suburban Rochester weeklies when their publisher retired.)
• “Canandaigua National Bank” is the major bank in Canandaigua. It's independent — local. We have our checking-account there.
• “Quark®” was the computer software the Messenger was done with during my employ.
• The Messenger was previously owned by the Ewing (“YOU-wing”) family. They owned it during my employ.
• “HTML” is hyper-text markup language, slightly more elegant than “text-only.” With HTML-tags you can embolden, underline, and italicize text. I use HTML in this blog. My pictures are via HTML tags.
• “Macros” are recordings of repeatable computer functions. I'd run a macro on a whole story, or column, to process it for print.