Editor’s note: The Edmonton Sun printed its inaugural issue just over 25 years ago. Below, staff writer Erik Floren traces the technological landscape the paper’s staff had to navigate in the days before Apple, Microsoft and digital became commonplace.

It’s been a generation since the proverbial monkey wrench dropped into Edmonton’s one-newspaper monopoly to create some healthy competition.

With the birth of The Edmonton Sun on April 2, 1978, the city suddenly became a sunnier place.

For want of a wrench, however, The Edmonton Sun almost didn’t rise on its inaugural morning 25 years ago.

The Sun didn’t possess its own press in the very beginning and so contracted out the actual printing.

Producing our newspaper was the biggest job that printer ever had. So big, the printer had to expand his presses — only to find out at the last minute the old motors were not strong enough to operate the new setup.

As our April 2 launch loomed, new motors were quickly installed but left no time for a test run.

When the button to start the presses was pushed that first night, nothing happened. Zilch. Not a sound. Folks stood slack-jawed, eyes ablaze.

Finally a press operator slid under the machinery. Scrambling around a bit, he screamed: “Get me a wrench!”

And the rest is history.

Skeptics abounded

Sure, we had our skeptics. Even Sun founder Doug Creighton harbored doubts because everything seemed so chaotic in the two weeks leading up to the debut.

But after the first issue rolled off the presses, The Sun rapidly became a part of the community and has gone on to serve legions of loyal readers for a quarter-century.

Although several technological advances have occurred during that span, the basics of newspapers never change.

“A great story is a great story, and a fantastic photograph stands the test of time,” said Editor-In-Chief Graham Dalziel. “Stories and pictures. These are the basic ingredients of our business and still will be when The Sun is 50 years old.”

What has changed is the way staff does their jobs.

“When The Sun began publishing in 1978, reporters ran around the city armed only with pencils, notebooks and a killer determination to get the story fast and first,” said Dalziel, who worked as a reporter when The Sun started.

“Photographers shot pictures using film, which was rushed back to the office for processing. Reporters banged out their copy on typewriters, and copy editors using line gauges and measuring wheels drew up pages and sized and cropped pictures.”

Digitization rules

Things are very different now.

“Computers, advanced electronic publishing systems and digital cameras are the order of the day. The Sun has taken full advantage of these quickly changing advances in technology and is now one of the best-equipped and most efficient newspapers in North America,” said Dalziel.

“The latest developments allow us to deliver more up-to-date stories and pictures every day. More changes are coming, and The Sun will continue to lead the way.”

Perhaps the most dramatic change came with the use of Postscript software, said Production Manager Will Stephani. “Postscript allowed for graphic manipulation on a computer to be done by the copy editors rather than the manual cut-and-paste we did previously.”

Postscript is a method of actually transferring what you have on a screen and imaging it to film, or — what The Sun is doing today — imaging directly to plate.

“Even in the past no matter how many people you’d have doing pages — we didn’t have the ability or the resources to produce the complexity in the layouts we’re doing today both in ads and editorial,” said Stephani.

Changed in storage

The Sun’s library has also revolutionized, said chief librarian Kathy Levesque.

“We have gone from paper clippings and glossy photos in file folders to digital files on CD and in databases. Poring over microfiche for hours has been replaced by typing a few words into a database,” said Levesque.

The library is now called the News Research Department; it became computerized in 1990 with floppy disks and advanced to 400 gigabyte RAID towers in 2000.

Photo editor Gary Bartlett’s biggest change was “the elimination of the darkroom, through the scanning of negatives — instead of printing photos and film.”

Then came digital photography, “which is incredible because we now have removed all of our darkrooms, our film machines and gotten ridden of our chemistry.”

Being digital means the work is cleaner, faster and far more mobile than it was 25 years ago. With laptop computers, photographers can transmit pictures from their vehicles, saving valuable time, said Bartlett.

“A photographer out in the West End at 8 o’clock at night used to have to come back here. And it took him an hour to get through traffic, process film and make prints.

“Now he can drive to the West End, shoot a picture, and in five minutes can have it in his laptop and be transmitting the picture while driving to the next job.”

Shift to color

Twenty-five years ago only black-and-white photos ran inside the newspaper. Then color. And now digital. The first digital photo ran in The Sun about 10 years ago but it was less than five years ago that photographers started shooting digital on a regular basis.

In 1994, a Saturday edition of The Edmonton Sun was launched. We were now publishing seven days a week. That was also the year that kicked off a variety of ownership changes. Owned then by Maclean Hunter, the communications giant along with its subsidiary Toronto Sun Publishing Corp. was sold in a $3 billion deal to Rogers Communications Inc.

Two years later Sun staffers put together a $411 million deal to buy the chain from Rogers — which included flagship The Toronto Sun, and sister Suns in Calgary, Edmonton and Ottawa — renaming it Sun Media Corp.

Taking over

Montreal-based Quebecor took over Sun Media in early 1999, closing a $983 million deal and taking control of 21 percent of newspaper circulation in Canada. The Winnipeg Sun become the fifth English-language tabloid in the chain and along with the Sun Media’s London Free Press and Quebecor’s French-language papers, the company became a presence in eight of Canada’s most important daily markets.

In the Edmonton market, according to the last Newspaper Audience Databank survey, The Sun was No. 1 among readers who have families and people under 50 years of age.

Yes, we’re the little paper that grew. But we still keep the wrench handy.

Reprinted with permission from Sun Media Corp.