Paper passes on primers on MPE, and more
May 25, 2012
Imagine it's your first day managing an HP 3000. You don't have to travel in a time machine to find that kind of event. However, a magic carpet of the past ensures the delivery of time-tested fundamentals. The carpet is paper, where so much MPE lore first unspooled for your community. If not for articles on paper, much of the 3000's wisdom would never have made it to the web.
As for that first day, an IT manager at Disston Tools in South Deerfield, Mass. has had that date arrive just this month. He's a total newbie, taking over for a veteran who's leaving this manufacturer. Everybody's a newbie at something. It's just like publishing news: if it's something you didn't know, then it's news to you.
Not many Interweb resources call themselves publishers, but we do. We started with ink on paper, my partner Abby and I, initially for a cross-platform IT publisher before the NewsWire was first delivered from our own offices. This week we delivered our 155th print issue. The May edition will be available to our community newbie, as well as one veteran that community icon Vladimir Volokh scouted out in Los Angeles. Vladimir hand-delivers print issues on his consulting trips, much to our delight.
With all that print heritage, I took note of a retrenchment in printed news this week. The daily newspaper in New Orleans will be daily no more. The Times-Picayune is going to three times weekly in print and everyday online. This is a newspaper that won two Pulitzers for its Katrina reporting. Sadly, the caliber of content doesn't bulwark many publications anymore. Advertisers, like our fine sponsors, determine how often the presses roll.
In the alternative, of course, there's the Interweb. I use the jokey term for online news because it's completely pervasive and so up to date that the future seems like yesterday if you bury your head in links. Knowing where to look, however, becomes a great mission for printed publications. We always hear that people have found our reports for the first time when they get a print issue of the NewsWire. It's nice to have that outpost, and essential to who we are and how we deliver. But for printed pages long gone, it's great to have host sites that preserve things like George Stachnik's instruction about using files in MPE, and much more. It's one of 21 articles in a series he wrote for the now-departed InterACT magazine. All are preserved for the education of newbies, as well as the rest of us.
But most of those papers started out on paper. Because MPE's preserved its roots, even an article like Stachnik's written more than a decade ago will be useful at Disston Tools. The company's covering its MANMAN support needs with service from the Support Group, Inc. Terry Floyd there gave us a heads-up about the new IT guy, and we're glad to send the new member our printed May issue.
Sponsors in your community still believe in the power of paper, even while they buy Adsense keywords from Google and build Twitter feeds and pursue Facebook Likes. We're always mindful that the NewsWire depends on support as well as new readers and faithful followers. We once led off with print reporting and archived it on the Web. But about the time Katrina was hitting New Orleans we switched out our lead horse -- with some exception. Every printed issue carries content that's only available in paper as an exclusive, for awhile. If you'd like your own printed copy in the US, we'd be glad to send it to you. (Click on the icon above to send us a message.) Our non-domestic web-only readers, thousands of them, have access off the page. Like the Times-Picayune, we're working with a blended model of the old and new, even as we link wisdom from the elders to our new readers.