Grocott’s Mail is always changing. We are proud of our long heritage as the oldest independent newspaper in the country, but we are always looking to the future. After all, news is our bread and butter, and news is by definition always new, always changing.
Grocott’s Mail is always changing. We are proud of our long heritage as the oldest independent newspaper in the country, but we are always looking to the future. After all, news is our bread and butter, and news is by definition always new, always changing.
Many of the changes we have experienced in recent years come as a result of new digital technologies. We have the newspaper printed in Port Elizabeth because it is easy to send the completed pages to the printers over the internet; we only make use of digital photography, we have a website and a mobile web site. All of this would have been almost inconceivable a mere two decades ago – and yet now it is quite commonplace.
One of the great advantages of the digital age is that with digital photography, you don’t have to worry whether you can afford to take any more expensive photographs. If you can take ten, you can take fifty or as many as you can fit onto your disc. In the days of film, you had to remember to buy extra films because you could usually only take 36 pictures with one spool and then after snapping you had to take the film to be developed. Sometimes this could take a few days, but by the mid-eighties, most shops could develop a film and print pictures in under an hour. (This explanation is for the under-25 readers)
Nowadays it is very easy, and dirt cheap to take as many pictures as you want. For this reason, when our photographers go out on a story, they usually take dozens, and sometimes hundreds of photographs. This sounds like overkill because we usually print only one or two photos per story. So what do we do with the rest, besides clog up our servers?
Well, we are increasingly putting more and more photographs on our web site,
