by David M. Cole
The author is a San Francisco newspaper consultant .

Go with me here.

I am the image of an athlete performing a feat of strength and passion at the Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia. My predecessors relied on the makers of film, chemistry and paper for their existence. I am a digital photograph only hours old, seen halfway around the world on the front page of your newspaper.

How? And what about that similar photograph in the national daily—did it travel the same path? And the words that accompany me? And what of the other photographs and stories that surround me? How did they get from their origins around the globe or around your neighborhood and to a newspaper that you hold in your hands?

This account of my trip from Sydney to your doorstep will answer all these questions. It involves awesome telecommunications tools and more than a modicum of skill and talent. Many, if not all, of the same tools come into play when the police reporter covering domestic violence, the photographer chasing fire engines in his car, the feature writer doing a color story on downtown lunchtime trends, and the shooter at a high-school baseball game, file for each new day’s edition. But the stakes rise higher and the time frame tightens considerably on international soil.

So let’s start.

IN THE BEGINNING

A few months ago, a photojournalist for a worldwide news agency put together a field pack including digital cameras, lenses, electronic flash, a laptop computer, modems and satellite cell phones in carry-on luggage the size of a big suitcase. The field kit spent 13 hours on a jetliner from North America to the antipodes (see sidebar, p. 41).

This morning, my wire-service photojournalist loaded the field pack in the back of a specially equipped van, with desks instead of seats. Upon arriving at the sporting event, she carefully selected exactly what was needed to create me: the cameras and lenses. She loaded them into a camera bag; the other components—the laptop computer, the cell phones—stayed in the van.

Festooned with badges and press passes, the photojournalist set up at a much-fought-for and prized place where a good image could be captured. Much to my creator’s chagrin, the photographer from the national daily set up about two feet away.

At this particular event, lots of images are made but at the salient moment—the defining moment of this athletic endeavor—my photojournalist clicked.

She pushed a button that made electrical contact, energizing an array of charged-coupled devices, rectangular silicon wafers capable of generating electrons when exposed to light. Usually, CCDs are micromanufactured into two-dimensional grids of rows and columns, each intersection comprising a pixel several microns in diameter. These CCDs recorded what appeared through the lens; the recording was a series of ones and zeroes then stored in a small card, about the size of a credit card, in digital memory.

My photojournalist knew at that moment that I was the picture that would appear on the front pages of thousands of newspapers around the world. A quick glance over to the colleague and competitor from the national daily suggested that she wasn’t the only one who captured the correct moment.

Each photo took a slightly different path to get to you.

PARKING-LOT HOCUS POCUS

My photojournalist high-tailed it back to the van and fired up the computer. She took the digital memory card out of the camera and placed it in the laptop.

A computer program displayed about 20 small images. From these, she quickly picked two other photos besides me and then launched a program that allowed fine-tuning. A little overexposure corrected here, a slight crop there. This program also handled two other tasks: my creator typed a caption into the program, and that caption—more ones and zeros—attached to my file. Second, the compression technology in the fine-tuning program reduced my file to a relatively small size.

Nonetheless, being in a laptop in a parking lot in a Sydney suburb doesn’t help me on my way to you. So my creator plugged the computer cable into a satellite phone. Using a telecommunications application, she dialed a telephone number in North America, and after a few seconds, the phone at the other end started to ring.

Her file traveled through the air. Her phone, the size of a briefcase with a small dish, sent my signal to “the bird” 22,300 miles above the earth. In turn, it bounced my signal stateside, moving at 56,000 bits per second. My signal headed to earth, this time pointed at North America’s West Coast.

Across the lot, the national daily photojournalist has followed roughly the same steps, but instead of plugging into a satellite phone, he plugged one end of a cable into a laptop computer’s modem and the other into a cellular telephone.

His image traveled through the air to the closest cell-phone antenna. From there, his file moved by wire to an Australian undersea long-distance office. It plunged into the Pacific Ocean and, via an underwater cable, made its way to U.S. shores.

EDITOR ANGST

Sitting halfway around the world, my next handler awaited my arrival. I got there in a second, literally.

My ones and zeroes entered the North American long-distance telephone system somewhere outside Los Angeles. I was carried on a wave of digital information that has been translated into audible signals; at the front end of those signals is a telephone number that just happens to terminate in the offices of the worldwide news agency in New York City.

The phone on the desk of the photo editor rang, followed by the familiar screech of his modem as my photojournalist’s modem negotiated speeds. Once the two modems agreed on transmission speed, as much as 19,200 bits per second, my ones and zeroes poured into the photo editor’s computer. About two minutes have elapsed.

My rival for attention at the national newspaper poked along on long-distance lines, but arrived stateside almost as quickly.

My photo editor looked at all the incoming pictures and quickly chose me (the talking image!). Using a data file-copying program, the editor moved me from his computer to a computer in the agency’s satellite office via a dedicated data-communications line. I was smoking then, moving at 6 million bits per second; I got to the satellite office in a flash.

At the satellite office, I was queued up with other photographs—some from Australia, others from all over—and flown up to a bird.

This time, instead of going down to only one receiving dish, my signal blanketed North America, and I was received in dishes at more than 1,000 newspapers. It probably took me five minutes to go from my photojournalist’s computer to here; if this were a critical situation and the digital camera was tethered to a computer hooked into the news agency’s network, the picture could arrive at newspapers almost instantly.

FRONT PAGES, AHOY

If schizophrenia is multiple personalities in one individual, what is one personality in multiple individuals? Oh, never mind.

I had become 1,000 digital-image files, copied to computer disks all over the continent. One landed in the computer of the photo editor for the national daily. I hate to admit this, but that editor rated my rival a better photo than I and put me into the reject directory. IÐor one of me—was heartbroken, but fared better elsewhere.

The next couple of steps were the same for both of us. We were placed in computer programs, where we had our colors adjusted for our respective printing presses. Then we were sent to pagination systems, where the words that the photojournalists entered in Australia became captions on pages.

LESS REMOTE ALL THE TIME

From the pagination systems, I traveled to raster-image processors and imagesetters. Depending on the paper, different things happened to me at this point. At newspapers with no pagination systems, I was actually duplicated on resin-coated papers and pasted onto the front pages. At others, I was duplicated on paper, but with all the other elements in place around me. And at a distinct minority of papers, each page became a Portable Document Format file. At all the newspapers featuring my image, printers made proofs of the whole pages I was on, just to check for accuracy.

After I had been RIPed, I was broken down into millions of tiny dots, about 1,000 dots per inch, stored as ones and zeros on computer disks. At newspapers using paste-ups, the pages were then put through a full-page scanner, where we were turned into dots similar to those from a RIP.

What happened to those dots depended on the production process. Here are some potential transmission methods on the way to the printing presses.

• High-speed data lines. Provided by the local telephone company, data lines come in two varieties: dial-up, and dedicated. The most common dedicated high-speed data line is called a T1Ð DS-1 is the proper nameÐ operating at 1.54 million bits per second. A T3, at 44.8 million bits per second, can mean later deadlines. A new kind of technology called a digital subscriber line can be configured point-to-point and provides the same 1.5 million bits at a much lower cost than T1. DS-1 could also be considered a dial-up service when configured for Internet access. Another dial-up service is integrated services digital network, starting at 6,400 bits per second and expanded up to 155 million bits per second.

• Frame relay. Direct links connect each of the plants and the local office of the phone company—but the links are shared. The maximum rate of speed is 44.7 million bits per second. The upside of frame relay is that it is good at connecting multiple facilities; the downside is a “cloud,” resulting from sharing the lines with other customers. The lines can become clogged.

• Internet. I know of no daily paper using the Internet as a delivery mechanism for pages, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one. Hey, I’m just an image. The technology would be similar to frame relay, except that instead of the frame relay “cloud,” there is the Internet, with all its attendant potential problems such as congestion and failure. Like dedicated high-speed lines, the Internet can carry up to 44.8 million bits per second. A newspaper can pay to set up a digital line with plenty of bandwidth between its office and an Internet service provider.

• Microwave link. When the newsroom and the presses are in a direct line of sight, a microwave system is a good alternative to the other delivery methods, as it requires capital, rather than operating, costs. In addition to a router, a microwave transmitter-receiver sits at each end of the link. Microwave operates in the 2-to-38 gigahertz frequency bands; the newest stuff runs from 18-to-38 gigahertz at the equivalent of roughly 6 million bits per second, though most systems have the option to upgrade to roughly 12 million bits per second. Line of sight can be an interesting concept: With relays, the microwave signal can be “banked” off antennas in other locations to get it to right place.

• Satellite link. This is the way my rival at the national daily went; the technology roughly mirrors a microwave link and is exactly the same as the satellite phone.

In addition to using a variety of transmission methods, U.S. publishers use two models for remote printing: distributed and centralized. In distributed printing, a central page-creation environment drives a large number of print sites. This would be the national-newspaper model. In the centralized printing model, numerous editorial departments feed a common print facility. The clustering concept is an example.

TO NEWSPRINT

I’ve now arrived as billions of ones and zeroes at a remote printing plant. If the prepress folks sent me and my cohorts as scanned or RIPed files, we were ready to go. If I was sent as PostScript or PDF, then I needed to be RIPed.

Next, at some papers, a film-based recording device imaged the bit file onto graphic-arts film with lasers. The film registered on light-sensitive plates briefly exposed to an arc light.

At a very few papers, my bits were sent from computer to plate using lasers. My sibling at the national daily goes CTP.

Plates were then processed with chemistry and mounted on presses. Bells rang, the presses turned, and papers spit out the end, or usually, the middle.

And here I am, on the front page. At most papers, I will get to your doorstep in a matter of hours by traveling by such old-fashioned means as trucks, cars, and bicycle. But from Australia to that printing press, more than likely I lived my entire life as a digital file.

Now you glance at me on the way out the door this morning. Later, I believe, there will be another bird in my future. But that’s another story.

The Field Pack A photojournalist’s field pack in the world of digital photography is somewhat different today than it was even a decade ago. Here are the contents of a “typical” field pack today, as outlined by The Associated Press and The New York Times. • Two digital cameras, brand and models subject to change as new ones become available. • Macintosh PowerBook G3, 128 megabytes of random-access memory and 12-gigabytes of hard drive partitioned into eight 650-megabyte sections to facilitate compact-disc recording and a 56,000-bit transmission speed modem. Software includes Photo Mechanic from Camera Bits of Portland, Ore.; Adobe Photoshop 5.5; ZTerm, a telecommunications application; Fetch, an Internet file transfer program; Netscape Navigator, a Web browser; Eudora, an e-mail client from Qualcomm Inc. of San Diego; and Toast, a compact-disc recording tool from Adaptic Inc. of Milpitas, Calif. • One eight-speed compact-disc writer. • Ten-to-20 blank compact discs. • Eight-to-10 160-megabyte flash memory cards for use in cameras. • Cellular telephone; news organizations have differing opinions on phones and cellular services to use. • Sometimes, a satellite telephone such as the Thrane & Thrane 3060.

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