From newspaper to magazine, print to online, my high school magazine has witnessed a plethora of changes quite similar to the fate of other newspapers within the past four decades. Former managing editor of the Scope, Mr. Greg Smith, sat down with me to discuss the transformations that have taken place since his high school journalism career in the 1970’s.


When were you managing editor of the Scope?

1971-1972. That was my senior year.


What do you think is the most significant change in terms of design?

The format that we lived with was a much smaller space to work with and very difficult to make attractive and enticing. The new format is much, much more flexible and better looking. The photographs were dismal in my era because we used old-fashioned technology. Photos were put into dots in what were called half tones.


How did you design the Scope?

Before computers, we had to write everything on a sheet of paper, called dummy sheets. They would be lined with the columns. So you’d have a piece of paper with five columns on it and you would take your ruler and figure out everything in picas. We would figure out where our masthead, photos and headlines would go. It was challenging to try and get everything in there let alone be creative with it. There was no space to run photos or headlines large enough and it was difficult to innovate because there was little flexibility.


When you were managing editor, did you change anything design-wise?

We had stayed with the recent redesign; they had already changed the fonts. I think we used more kickers, which is a little line above the main one. I did a lot of redesign work when I was working for newspapers in the real world. I redesigned two papers and helped to computerize too and made one edition from scratch. The Scope, though, we didn’t have as much latitude back then.


How did you find yourself on the journalism path in high school?

I always liked to write and I think I was first published in the third grade. I always enjoyed the creativity of writing and at school it was really photography that got me started. I worked in the yearbook my freshman year exclusively, and then in my sophomore year, I started to get involved with the paper. Back then it wasn’t a subject; yearbook and the Scope were just extracurricular activities. We had a journalism class and most of us took it if we were active on the paper. But I ended up getting sucked into journalism as the Watergate Scandal started heating up. That made it more exciting; those were very heady days for journalists. We were pretty much at ground zero here in McLean. The attorney general’s daughter was a student here and I remember being in her living room watching her dad testify on TV. On the Scope staff was Tom Erlichman, the son of one of the two top advisers to Nixon.


Where did you pursue journalism after high school?

I was able to become the managing editor at Arizona State when I went to school there, and that had a circulation of about 25,000 so it was bigger than some small daily newspapers.


Where did you work after you graduated from college?

I was still in college when I got my first job at the Arizona Republic, and that’s the biggest paper in Arizona. It had a circulation of almost a half a million on Sundays back then. Those were the good old days when everybody read papers. A friend lured me away to Petersburg, Virginia when he took over that paper and wanted me to help him redesign it. And we lasted all of ten months or so because a big newspaper chain owned the paper and they were obsessed with pinching pennies, and our redesign cost them a pittance more what they were already spending and they didn’t want to part with their pennies. He resigned, so there I was, I had given up my job at the Republic and I was in no man’s land there being told that I had to undo all the redesign that we’d done. I left and went back to Arizona and I ran into a hiring freeze there because there was a recession and the city editor that promised to hire me couldn’t because they wouldn’t fill any openings. Then I worked for a smaller paper in the suburbs called the Mason Tribune, and I was supposed to be the Sunday editor and when I traveled 2,000 miles to get there, I walked into the newsroom and was told that I would be the women’s editor. We transformed it into a lifestyle section so that worked out OK. And then I became news editor and city editor and eventually managing editor.

Are you still working in the journalism industry?

No, I left journalism to become an entrepreneur in 1986. I worked as a cabinet member’s spokesman for a few years in governor Bruce Babbitt’s administration and then I went to importing handcrafts. I just fell into it by accident because I knew nothing about fashion accessories and that’s what I started selling: woven goods from Guatemala. This was in the days before the friendship bracelets became popular in the 1980’s and there’s been kind of a rebound of the bracelets. I ended up doing that for almost a quarter century.

Were there any other male staff members? The Scope has not had a male editor for the past five years.

It was more like 50/50 on our staff.


Do you remember who your adviser was?

During the last year, Trudy Sundberg was our adviser and she was fantastic. Everybody loved her and she had a way of keeping everybody energized. She was one of those people that was just exuding energy constantly and getting everybody psyched. She didn’t just teach, she also got us excited about it.


How many people did you have on staff?

There were close to two-dozen people, but there were others that would contribute to a lesser extent.


What technology was used back then in order to produce the paper?

The format was night and day different and that was mainly dictated by the old dinosaur technology. We had used typewriters; personal computers were nearly a decade in the future. Hardly anybody used a recorder back then since that was a new invention. We had reporter notebooks and we were frantically scribbling everything. Editing was really difficult because we had to do everything by hand. If you wanted to capitalize something, you’d put three bars underneath it, and you wanted to get rid of a letter, you’d put a line through it and put an upside down parentheses. The typesetter would sit and type and each time they finished a line, it would put molds in for each letter and then it would cast it in molten metal. While you were editing, if you just wanted to radically change a sentence, you had to rewrite it. I remember when I was working at the Arizona Republic my hands would be covered in gray because of the graphite. Photography was all on film, and photographers mostly developed their own film. In the old days, we used the expression “did it turn out?” because we didn’t know until we sent that film away somewhere to be developed if it turned out. I actually had nightmares sometimes about something going wrong with important photos.



How were editors selected?

The adviser, Trudy, would choose editors after interviews.


Do you like the new magazine format or do you prefer the traditional newspaper?

The new format is fantastic. It’s a beautiful product graphically and the reproduction was way better than what we had. You have more space to cover everything and more space for ads as well. Your new format is infinitely better. There is a certain nostalgia that goes along with newsprint and it is more the older folks like myself that feel that nostalgia. When newspapers moved from line of type to offset press printing, that was revolutionary for us because it gave us much more flexibility and design and better resolution.

How was proofreading back then?

It was challenging doing proofreading in the old days with line of type. You had something called galley proofs where they would take a sheet of paper and put ink on the type and it should’ve all been backwards. And then it looks normal when they print it. Sometimes there was a mistake in the correction line so they had to redo the whole line. We had to check those and a lot of times on deadline, there would be no time to get it approved so you’d have to read the line backwards. So that’s how I learned to read backwards and even upside down.


What was the atmosphere like during deadline?

I remember as a managing editor of the Suburban Daily, when there was a breaking news story, you would go down into the pressroom and it would be that giant press that was a couple stories tall. It was always a thrill when they started up and it would be like a train starting with just barely any movement at first and then faster and faster. The press guys would be running from one spot to another adjusting the ink and turning it faster and faster until the newspapers were literally flying off the end. The thrill of a deadline is hard to beat and the excitement of news breaking is exhilarating.


How often would you come out with an issue?

The Scope came out every two weeks. The work can be fun. That’s what I always liked about it. Even a bad day in newspapers was more interesting than most jobs.