I love writing history pieces, so when my editor tapped me for a story about our paper’s upcoming birthday, I was pretty excited.
It was difficult to summarize nine decades of newspaper history into one 40-inch story, but I think I managed. I had so much fun interviewing past employees and hearing about the good ol’ days of print journalism.
The story is behind our paywall, but here are a few highlights:
— Women had to wear dresses and men had to wear ties before Scripps bought Naples Daily News in 1986.
— We used to be an afternoon paper printed just six days a week, and before that, we were a four-page weekly based in Everglades City.
— You could smoke in the newsroom up until the 1980s.
— We got our first digital camera in the late 1990s and it cost a fortune.
— At the time Scripps bought NDN, they paid the highest amount of money per subscriber in the history of newspaper sales.
— We used to have a policy that if your newspaper was wet upon delivery due to frequent summer storms here in Florida, we’d bring you a new one in 30 minutes.
