Pagination is by aged Harris 8300 terminals, with some overdesigned color fronts done on the Macintosh. Maybe an hour of system introduction, followed by informal help from fellow rimmers. Extra pages are okay. Any new task, most recently sending stories to the new web page, falls to the copy desk. The paper won't pay for new dictionaries or stylebooks, so we have a mixed bag.
Local style is haphazard and unpublished.
There is very little collective local historical memory. We're understaffed and are to lose another position this summer. When the paper went to pagination, a nightside backshop staff of about eight compositors was replaced by two full-time paginators, with the city desk and copy desk left to pick up the rest of the production. I'm leaving a lot out, all of it bad.