Letter From the Editor: Turning the Page

Today we say goodbye to an old friend, a morning habit for generations. This is the final newsprint edition of WWD. We pause to acknowledge this scrappy newspaper and its 105 years of chronicling an equally scrappy industry. Decades ago, anxious reporters smoked at their desks, manual typewriters clacked, Linotypes pumped, Teletypes hummed and pneumatic tubes (the latest miracle technology at the time) carried wire reports from floor to floor through the old Fairchild building on East 12th Street. When deadline descended, colossal presses in the basement cranked up and thundered through the floors. Old-timers still talk about how the presses shook the entire building, quite a romantic coda to a day’s work of reporting inside the daily news cycle. At one time, newsboys even delivered an afternoon edition of the paper. Today, there’s nothing cyclical about news. It’s Instant Media. A global Niagara of information in a river of technology. Linotypes and Teletypes have given way to silent servers and an alphabet soup of functions and utilities, SEO, URLs, PDFs, CMS, APPs. We all know how technological leaps have rattled traditional business models across all industries. Facebook has a bigger market capitalization than Coca-Cola. But for anyone in the news business, the two

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