By Tom Hintgen

Otter Tail County Correspondent

The late 1960s and early 1970s was a remarkable time to be working at newspapers in Otter Tail County. About 1972 newspapers in our county and across the state of Minnesota saw the transition from letterpress hot type to offset cold type printing.

In Fergus Falls, Daily Journal employees moved in March 1972 from the old letterpress offices downtown on South Mill Street, across from the post office, to a new building with offset printing at East Channing and Pebble Lake Road.

In the letterpress days, anyone walking into the ‘back shop’ downtown where the compositors worked on the second floor was immediately met by the metallic clatter of the Linotype machines and the smell and heat from the melting lead that fed the machines. The back shop staff set type into frames called chases, often in close collaboration with the newsroom staff who designed the news pages.

The compositors developed amazing skills at reading type backwards as they arranged it in the chases, since the metal type was a mirror image of what it looked like when printed. Ultimately, the pages were fed to the press crew in the building’s basement, all on tight deadlines.

The new digs on East Channing Avenue with offset printing were nice but they didn’t have the character of the old building with letterpress. Those were the days with unairconditioned heat in the summer and sometimes additional cold in the winter. 

For those in the newsroom on East Channing, with offset printing, the change was minimal. Reporters went on writing, editing and taking photos as usual. But for the back shop, where the production occurred, it was very challenging. With offset printing, back shop employees went from creating pages with metal to creating pages on paper, cutting and pasting stories and advertising copy onto the pages. 

Instead of using Linotypes to create the copy, stories were typed into a machine reminiscent of an early computer, and punch tape was used for generating Associated Press copy.