From pen to laptop: A S’pore journalist’s journey

By Seah Chiang Nee

I crossed my 51st year as a working journalist recently, a journey that took me from the ball-point pen and typewriter to a high-speed laptop.

In a place where journalism isn't too highly regarded, the profession has rarely kept practitioners going for a long period, so I consider it a pretty fair show.

As long time former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew once said, most students chose journalism only when they failed to get into any other course.

Now, at 71, as I am beginning to feel technologically settled in with the personal computer, I am now told it may be on the way out — with the exit of two large U.S. makers.

Making its way in is a new generation of small, mobile gadgets (thank you, Steve Jobs) that allow a reporter to transmit his story (or video) before putting them back into his pocket.

For an old journalist who once had to queue up to "phone in" his copies, the digital revolution in the 80s was awesome.

Beginning of the road

My first lesson came when I was a 20-year-old knocking on office doors along Robinson Road seeking a job.

That was in 1960 when work was scarce and writing letters wasn't enough.

One of my cold calls took me to an office next to the old Cable and Wireless office (we were then British) that was filled with clattering teleprinters.

Operators were busy transmitting news to newspapers all over the world.

I had stumbled into the premises of Reuters, the international news agency, which offered me a precious job as a trainee sub-editor.

That started me off but the first advice I got from a veteran news hound had nothing to do with writing.

"Remember, no matter how great your story is it is worthless if you can't get it to your readers," the former Battle of Britain pilot told me about international communications.

He was serious. For weeks I had to learn to operate the teleprinter and to correct mistakes in the ticker tape which consisted of a series of small dots.

Why? I wanted to know. "It will help make you a global reporter.

"You may one day need to transmit your own story in an emergency," he explained.

I realised I was now in the communications industry.

As a young islander, it wasn't always easy to look at the world as something bigger than Johor which I occasionally visited — and nowhere else.

In 1960, the PC wasn't born yet, and Steve Jobs was only five years old.

The cellphone (or its predecessor, the pager or beeper) had not yet arrived.

Neither had any of today's wonders like the smartphone, tablet or fibre optic technology. These came to Singapore much later than the miniskirt and The Beatles.

From pen to typewriter

My own high-tech reporting tool was then a ball-point pen that took me to the length and breadth of Southeast Asia before I graduated to the typewriter — a weather-beaten, orange-coloured portable Olivetti.

Then wonder of wonders, came an electric typewriter, which sat proudly on my desk, which made me feel that I had arrived.

There was, however, a flaw in this technology. Many rural regions that I had to report from had little or no electricity.

For several years, my faithful Olivetti served me well and when its demise came — killed by the personal computer — it was the end of an era.

No journalist my age can talk about the portable typewriter without a deep sense of gratitude.

In 1999, giant typewriter-maker Smith-Corona closed its global operations.

Several years earlier, its rival, Olivetti shut its Singapore plant that was churning out 100,000 electric typewriters a year for the world.

The typewriter — whether electric or not — was no match for the worldwide web.

It was ironic. At the time when the typewriter was being discarded in Singapore (and the West) as obsolete, it was still a futuristic machine to millions in Asia and Africa who could not afford it.

In the early 90s, a friend of mine returned from Yangon and told me the ball-point pen was still pretty much in evidence in government offices.

In one department, about a dozen civil servants were sharing two bulky outdated typewriters.

In fact when they stopped making them, my teenage son had at the time never seen, let alone used, one.

Smarter, faster, smaller

Now he and millions of his peers are immersed in the new wireless, 3D broadband world where people use a brand new language that I am still trying to pick up — like Android, Flash Memory and Apps.

Technology now is getting smarter, faster and smaller and helping to speed up the Information Age.

When I was reporting the Vietnam War in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) as a Reuters reporter, I was once sent back to Singapore on an urgent mission.

Tens of thousands of Buddhists were staging anti-war protests — some violently — all over the city, which made reporting coordination difficult.

I was to buy half a dozen walkie-talkie sets for use by the correspondents.

At Change Alley, I selected the gadgets and was warned by the shopkeeper that it was illegal to use them in Singapore. They were only for export.

Today the police have bigger worries than that — like cyber-terrorism and digital theft.

Other tech stuff came and went — some very quickly, while others took their time.

However, none has succeeded in replacing the human brain at its best.

By itself technology will never produce a brilliant practitioner of any profession.

A former Reuters correspondent and newspaper editor, the writer is now a freelance columnist writing on general trends in Singapore. This post, which he slightly later revised, first appeared on his blog www.littlespeck.com on 15 October 2011.