One of the justifications for terse writing is the supposed cost of space. An inch of space in the New York Times, for example, would cost a fortune.

So if the publishers of Gotham City’s leading newspaper can, they’ll sell the space for a premium price and try not to give too much of it away.

The notion of tight newspaper space came clear to me this week as I watched David Giuliani, the Optic’s managing editor, going through old files for his Back in Time feature that appears on Page 1 every day.

This month, Giuliani picked files from July 1942, about many people who have since passed on. Someone born in 1942 would be in the mid-60s. But more impressive are the appearance and the content of those old files.

The Optic looked like many other newspapers of that era, with screaming all-caps headlines in 2-inch type. A banner headline that read “FIVE SLAIN IN DRUNKEN BRAWL” invariably would carry a distant or even foreign dateline.
Local news was scarce.

In pre-TV days, newspapers needed to be much more detailed and to carry much national and international news. At the same time, radio stations commonly carried half-hour newscasts three or four times a day to compensate for the lack of CNN or Fox News channels, which hadn’t yet been invented.

The page size of the Optic — a broadsheet as opposed to a tabloid — was about 17 inches, five inches wider than today’s edition. Most pages contained eight columns, as opposed to the five or six that comprise today’s pages.

The page I examined had 17 articles, only a couple of photos, and incredibly small type. Eight-point type, which is just a bit bigger than the font size of today’s classified ads, filled all the pages.

Today, even with page sizes about 25 percent smaller than those of the olden days, the exorbitant cost of print real estate hasn’t completely revamped the content or writing style.

Let me explain:

In the olden days, when I took a part-time job at the Optic, the long-time editor, Walter Vivian, laid out inviolable rules. One was to say it in as few words as possible. That rule applied doubly for headlines. Therefore, we never wrote “unnecessary” words in headlines, such as “a,” “and,” or “the.” Those words, however, have always been permissible in the body of articles; in fact, no good editor would ever encourage writers to be overly elliptical, to write “Man killed in shooting spree” as part of the body of a story. That kind of telescopic writing would read like a headline instead.

What caused the change in space matters to create pages with large photos, plenty of white space and an occasional “a,” “and” and “the”? Did newsprint and ink become more affordable? More likely, the way the news is received has made it easier for editors to play with front pages, to experiment with different fonts, colors and illustrations.

Part of my part-time job in 1956 was, literally, to unjam a machine that always seemed to stall minutes before I arrived.

We received the news through teletype machines, connected to phone wires. Crews in distant cities would type out wire stories to be transmitted to newspapers like the Optic.

The machines, operated by an invisible early-morning typist, printed a readable copy of the news while simultaneously punching holes into a long roll of tape that contained a coded version of the copy, and it went to a Linotype machine that “read” the tape and produced the hot type.

The machine guaranteed to jam up in the early morning wouldn’t go on the fritz while churning out stock market reports; no, it got stuck only when transmitting the day’s top story. We missed many a big story due to a recalcitrant tape puncher.

We saved boxes and boxes of the microscopic paper dots and later donated them to local parishes to fill eggshells for their cascaron dances at Easter.

In those days, we didn’t have the luxury of color photography or even plain photography. Until the Optic bought an engraving machine, any likely local photo needed to be shipped by bus to Albuquerque, to a place that made a “mat” of the photo, and sent it back to us days later.

When the Scan-a-Graver arrived, allowing us to scan our own photographs, the public began seeing more photos. But that still didn’t make our jobs easy.

Anyone who’s ever developed pictures knows the myriad preparations of foul-smelling chemicals involved. Film was expensive and extremely sensitive to light; photographic paper needed to be kept tightly covered, and we used photo enlargers which were high-tech at the time, but whose lenses had about as much acuity and definition as the bottom of a Coke bottle.

When a local high school student, Leroy Segura, took a job as a photographer, we agreed to time him to see how long it took from taking the photo to producing a dry print ready for engraving.

My recollection is that it took 37 minutes, a time the Optic publisher gladly granted, just so we could publish the photo in that day’s paper.

Segura worked efficiently, but, it must be stressed, he devoted all his time to a single photo and didn’t have the luxury of picking and choosing.

In these more modern times, a photo taken minutes ago gets downloaded to the computer in minutes, sometimes seconds. Don Pace, the Optic’s prolific photographer, generally is able to display dozens of digital images for inclusion in that day’s paper.

What used to take two or three strong men, Pete Garcia, Carlos Crespin and Ralph Martinez, several minutes of struggling to load a heavy metal page into the press now takes just a couple of computer clicks.

With the Internet becoming such a force, newspaper publishers all over are wondering about and preparing for the next step for the press.

But regardless of where technology takes us, some things will remain constant: we’ll forever hear laments like these: “You gave the other team too much coverage,” “You’re too negative” and “Don’t you have more important things to write about?”