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Florida Atlantic University's Student Newspaper Meets Hot Tub Time Machine

In today's newsrooms, using Windows 95, connecting to AOL 3.0 with a 56k modem, and using Adobe PageMaker to complete a newspaper would sound like an absolute nightmare.Then there are the collegians at Florida Atlantic University who decided to make it even worse -- taking newspapers back to a day...
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In today's newsrooms, using Windows 95, connecting to AOL 3.0 with a 56k modem, and using Adobe PageMaker to complete a newspaper would sound like an absolute nightmare.

Then there are the collegians at Florida Atlantic University who decided to make it even worse -- taking newspapers back to a day when shag carpeting and olive-colored appliances were all the rage.

Enter the University Press' very own version of Hot Tub Time Machine.

They used these things called typewriters, along with scissors, glue, and 35mm film to put together this issue of their newspaper.

One of New Times' prized freelance photographers, Mike Rice, headed the paper's photo department for the project, which -- of course -- he operated out of the men's bathroom.

Copyediting was done by pencil and embraced those strange editing symbols of yore -- which they probably had to look up in the back of an actual copy of a dictionary.

Of course, some actual reporting had to be performed in between battling dinosaurs out in the wild.

The result: a real, functional newspaper.

Journoterrorist documented the trials and tribulations of the Crusades paper's production, giving a more in-depth look at what it takes to build a newspaper before the fall of Rome age of modern newspaper production:

While archeologists try to recreate what life was like 10,000 years ago, and historians try to recreate what life was like 1,000 years ago, journalists can't even recreate how they published a newspaper 20 years ago. No one documented the details or saved the old equipment. (I had to buy some of it from creepy old men through Craigslist.)

The University Press can be found online here.


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