Rants and raves about burning topics that have caught my attention midweek, be it greedy corporate shenanigans, frustration or joy in regards to the Philly sports teams, a movie or DVD that has fired up my imagination, an intriguing personality, or my on-going battle to lose weight in our fast food world. — Lori Hoffman, Associate Editor, Atlantic City Weekly

With the launch this week of our terrific new Web site, and this being the 35th anniversary of AC Weekly/The Whoot, it got me to thinking about all the amazing changes that have taken place in the newspaper business.
Look, we all know that the newspaper business is evolving daily and that the end of hard copy papers is looming. Those of us journalistic dinosaurs who still get a great deal of pleasure from reading the Sunday paper — in our hands, not on a computer screen — will be sad the day the newspapers die. Maybe it won’t be in my lifetime (I’m 55), but I suspect it will.
And, although I might be an old school dinosaur, that doesn’t mean I’m sitting around moping about it. I used to write stories on a yellow note pad. Eventually I learned to use a typewriter and then an electric typewriter. I was still using the plain typewriter when I wrote movie reviews and sports stories for the Argo, the Stockton College newspaper. I believe I had graduated to an electric model when I slipped my first movie review for Whoot! (The Entertainment Paper for Night Owls), under a garage door in Somers Point in 1975. The paper began as a monthly and was started by my fellow Argo colleague, Lew Steiner; actually, we have known each other since the fifth grade in Ventnor. Lew didn’t think about movie reviews until the second year of Whoot.
However, from that beginning, I eventually wrote a variety of entertainment stories as the paper went from being a monthly to a weekly. Later I got gigs for papers in Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Journal (as the film critic) and the Evening Bulletin. Both went out of business, the Journal deservedly so, the Bulletin after 126 years.
I came back to Whoot full time in 1983 and have been with the paper ever since. I saw the beginning of the computer age, with horrible photographic typesetting machines I had nightmares about. On deadline, if I made one mistake with a code, I had to do it all over again. Then came real computers and the glorious freedom of the World Wide Web. As much as I love doing research, I became a ‘Net junkie. In 2000, Review Publishing (Philadelphia Weekly) brought the Whoot and our publication grew-up and matured into Atlantic City Weekly. That brought a new set of changes and challenges.
Now, with the launch of our new Web site, AC Weekly might still come out just once a week in hard copy, but we now have the capacity to be a daily paper on-line beyond my usual blog postings. When news hits, we can write about it immediately and file it on-line.
I am ready to dive it head first, ‘cause I’m an old dinosaur who can learn new tricks!

Tags: atlantic city weekly, Whoot

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 29th, 2009 at 2:54 pm and is filed under Hump Day Report, Local News, Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.