Forty years ago today I walked into a newsroom for the first time as a full-time professional journalist.

That was a very long time ago, and even longer in the context of print journalism’s modern era — where the only certainty has been change.

Looking back, we can see at least three significant eras in newspapers over that 40 years, which is a lot, given that the industry had not changed radically over the previous 75 years. Not since the telephone.

The three eras my contemporaries and I worked through:

1. The Transitional Era.

My first day at the San Bernardino Sun-Telegram, as it was known at the time, was the day that San Bernardino native Dave Stockton won golf’s PGA Championship for the second time. It was a huge story, and I suppose that it took me a while to appreciate that we would not have a story that juicy every day.

But, we didn’t do anything particularly special with the story. A big headline, the Associated Press report. At the time, most newspapers were not particularly nimble with breaking news. The notion of going up pages and doing photo galleries … did not happen on deadline.

(Graphically, midsize newspapers were quite primitive, in that era.)

We were still ripping wire news off the chattering wire machines, which were lined up in a long room, pasting the edited copy to a work order after writing in a headline (counting the letters to see if X number of words would fit on a line, which seems prehistoric, now) and editing the wire report for style and content with old-fashioned symbols. (An x inside an o meant “period”. Something underlined twice meant “capitalize”.)

Local news was banged onto brown sheets of paper, usually with carbon paper between two sheets, via the manual typewriter at every desk, and we guessed at the length of the story, in words, by counting the typewritten lines and multiplying by 10.

The stories were rolled up and went into a plastic canister with a rubber opening at one end and some foam at the bottom, to create a vacuum and cushion the fall — and sent off through a pneumatic tube to the production department, downstairs. I can still hear the clatter of the tubes, about 10 inches long, as they rushed back and crash-landed in a rubber receptacle at our end of the tube line.

I missed the era of “hot type” by a month or two. That called for linotype compositors who cast pages with leaden letters — which is how pages were produced for about a century.

On August 16, 1976, the “offset” form of printing had been installed in San Bernardino, and it used mostly part-time workers to get stories ready to be assembled via “cold” type (rather than “hot lead”), with many of the old, proud linotype operators forced to paste-up cold type by waxing the back of a rubbery sheet, cutting out text and headlines and attaching them to a page-size form, which then went to the “camera” which produced a negative, and on to the press.

In many ways, print journalism as a career was not far different, in 1976, from what it had been a generation before — a profession for people who never planned to be rich (and hardly even middle-class), who liked working strange hours, as well as the rush of making a daily deadline, appreciated history and didn’t mind a little bit of notoriety and were more than a bit nosy — people who wanted to know what was going on so they could tell everyone else.

A veteran sports writer at my newspaper, a man with 30 years experience, in 1976 was making $400 a week. That works out to $20,800 a year. The rest of us made less. I started at $184.50 a week, and I thought that was quite a bit of money and, to be sure, a single person could live on it.

Meanwhile, the reputation of journalists was improving. The Washington Post’s coverage of the Watergate scandal had brought down a president, and that made the field more glamorous and, I believe, led to more ambitious young people clamoring to be in print.

The other real changes were about machines.

Our Dodgers reporter transmitted his copy to the sports desk via a “fax”-like machine that he carried to games in a suitcase. No more dictating stories to rewrite editors in the office.

In short order came several other methods of filing. At The Sun, the next era involved a 30-pound, blue “portable” computer called a Teleram. It was a keyboard with a tiny screen, and it not only made possible editing your own copy, it allowed a reporter to send via a phone line direct into the new, front-end computer system in the office. It also involved a magnetic tape, onto which you recorded each of your “takes”. When it was time to send, you logged on to the computer via the phone, and sent each of your three or four screens of type.

It was a great time-saver, but the 30-pound machine led to lots of back injuries. No, really. And you couldn’t check them, and they barely fit under a seat on an airline. Also, there were other varieties of portables that used a similar technology and perhaps weighed less.

Crucial to this, of course, was the computerized newsroom. The typewriters disappeared, replaced by bulky desk-top computers. They were fairly slow and buggy, but paper was essentially eliminated, and the computer allowed later deadlines and brought the editing functions into the newsroom. Before this, “proofreaders” checked up on the linotype operators with reporters and editors often out of the loop.

Then came the biggest single improvement in filing tools for reporters — the TRS 80 (sometimes known as a “trash 80”) a keyboard with a six-line viewing screen. It was light and hard to break and could run on batteries as well as socket power and filed via any phone you could find and was very cheap — $200 or so. Soon, most every reporter in the room had their own.

Meantime, newspapers had saved money by essentially eliminating two departments in the daily operation — the linotype operators and proofreaders.

2. The Glory Days

Let’s say these began in the early 1980s and continued through the end of the century.

During this time, newspapers were extremely popular, with many boasting record circulation figures year after year.

It was a particularly good time for those who bought newspaper stocks, which were considered a very solid investment.

Newspaper chains like Gannett, Cox, McClatchy and Times-Mirror typically dominated a local market and could set advertising prices fairly high. Gannett, which owned The Sun, where I worked, typically demanded 25 percent profit from our “unit” — and usually got it. Some papers generated even greater profits. Thirty percent, or even higher.

We complained, in newsrooms, about how rapacious the chains were, but in many ways things were getting better because of the chains — which generally required a level of competence that some of the old family-owned newspapers had not felt necessary.

Newspaper display became far more dynamic, especially once the “page-layout machine” (PLT) entered the newsroom later in the 1980s. It essentially ended the paste-up process, eliminating a tier of part-time jobs.

PLTs brought advanced layout into the newsroom, and everyone hired specialists to handle these new and precious machines. It tended to heap pressure on the one or two people who operated the PLTs, moving copy blocks around, adjusting headline sizes, etc. But it allowed editors to know everything would “fit” on the page because it would not send a page to camera until every story fit. (No more X-acto knives downstairs to cut cold type to fit. This also is when I stopped carrying a pica pole, though I still own one.)

Right around this time, too, four-color photos became an industry standard. The black-and-white front pages disappeared. USA Today, the last great newspaper start-up, was full-color from Day 1, in September of 1982.

So, improving technology, all layout and editing functions in the hands of journalists … all good.

Also good was that newspapers became so successful that salaries began to climb. Surge, even. By the end of the 1980s, a $40,000-a-year salary was common for untitled employees. At the big papers, the stars and managers were making six figures.

This was unheard of. None of us, in 1976, entered the profession planning to make significant money, but all of a sudden we were doing so — and it continued through most of the 1990s.

The 20 years from 1980 to 2000 saw reporters and editors paid more money than at any time in newspaper history. The period also saw the best, most-accurate and most complete newspapers in U.S. history, in my opinion, because of big editorial staffs and a rise in qualifications from kids coming out of college. Modular layout, clean and easy to read, graphic devices like maps and charts, stories that had been read by at least three editors, and sometimes more, and often later deadlines because the streamlined production system gave back time to the newsroom.

The leading newspapers, like the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, were daily magazines, practically, in terms of the depth and breadth of the information provided. As many as five or six sections, maybe 80 pages of news and ads per day — and far more on Sundays, which included special sections and produced a newspaper so heavy that small dogs could not fetch it off the driveway.

This also was the zenith of newspaper power. By this time, nearly no communities had competing newspapers, and the sole survivor could set advertising prices — for top-end auto dealerships and department stores and grocery stores. Classified ads were voluminous and another major source of revenue.

Times were good, did I mention that? Newsroom staffs were at record highs. We all got raises nearly every year, and long before the new millennium everyone my age and older was amazed at how much money we were making to work at jobs we loved. Not serious money, by the standards of “professionals” like doctor and lawyers, but we were paying part-timers nearly as much money as our most senior guy had gotten, in 1976.

Another aspect of this era was new, even frivolous spending by every newspaper from “mid-sized” and up — state, national, international correspondents; more specialists in the newsroom, like cartoonists; sports departments that sent reporters all over the country to cover “away” games for the major local teams. (The Dodgers had something like 11 home-and-road beat writers around 1990. The Yankees had more.)

Many newspapers developed teams of investigative reporters (see: Boston Globe and Spotlight). Business sections grew from a few pages to big, fat sections of 16-20 pages.

We could make a case that the public was best-served by newspapers during this stretch of time, 1980 to 2000. Yes, everything was eight hours old by the time the newspaper landed on driveways, but even modestly sized newspapers were thorough and intelligent, and if readers consumed a local and a regional newspaper, they were well-informed, indeed. At least through last night’s developments.

We thought it would never end. Even as one or two people in the newsroom kept yammering away about what Bill Clinton called “the information superhighway”.

3. The Internet Era.

Ah, and then it all came crashing down.

It was a sort of delayed reaction. Most newspapers had rudimentary websites by the turn of the century, but the print product remained king. The notion of a newspaper devoting most of its energy to the web was resisted or scoffed at.

Resistance, however, was futile. Had newspapers embraced the worldwide web from the instant it stirred to life, it would not have mattered.

The web brought the immediacy audiences craved, and by the early years of this century, newspapers began to see advertising and circulation numbers slip. Younger readers wanted up-to-the-moment news, and they wanted it on their screens — first desktops, then laptops, then tablets, phones, etc.

This was disastrous for print.

Advertisers pulled out of newspapers because readers stopped subscribing. Or it could have been the other way round.

Profits plummeted. Newsroom layoffs began in earnest by 2004 or so, and the Great Recession of 2008 decimated newsrooms. (I was fired in 2008.) Newspapers like the Los Angeles Times, which had 1,200-plus journalists at its height, began laying off hundreds of people. LAT now has fewer than 400 journalists.

It has been like that across the country.

Some newspapers have gone bust. Others have cut back on how many days it produces a print newspaper. Nobody is making much money.

Newspapers have not been able to figure out how to monetize the web. They might gets lots of eyeballs to their site, but few readers can be shown to stay and work their way through the new content.

Social media became a driver for news. The new technologies had none of the checks and balances of a newsroom, but no cared because it was here right this minute, and if it was wrong it probably would get corrected in later posts. In theory.

Newspapers were hollowed out. Bureaus closed and staff was hacked and travel cut back.

Nearly every journo of the Baby Boom generation at some point was fired or took a buyout or quit — perhaps because of the demands that the web puts on journalists. (Stories for the web, another for print, social media components like tweeting, maybe some video posted, too.)

Newspaper stock tanked. Salaries plummeted. Entry-level journos, about the only sort employed anymore, were back making what that senior reporter had been paid in 1976, when adjusted for inflation.

A steady and exciting career, which offered fun but not much money … became an important and well-compensated and fun job … became a gloomy career with ever-shrinking employment, spiraling into insignificance, unsure still how it can survive if, indeed it will.

Over the span of one generation’s lives, newspapers experienced the greatest days in their history … as well as many of their worsts.

It has been jarring for those who rode the elevator up, then took it back down, at an even greater speed. I was cushioned by two temporary stints with the International Herald Tribune and then six years at The National in Abu Dhabi, into December 2015.

I feel bad for those who may have left the industry before they were ready (and I can’t really say I am one of them), and I feel worse for the current journalists, whose future is unclear and earning power has evaporated.

Maybe we could include dozens of other careers in this best of times/worst of times, scenario (assembly-line jobs; travel agencies; buggy-whip makers) … and perhaps all of us whose latter years coincided with the collapse of their profession can nod and say, “Well, it was great while it lasted!”

I had no idea what sort of journey I was undertaking, 40 years ago today, but it rarely too us where we thought we were going.