Buckle up folks.
The South Shore Press is going to provide wall-to-wall coverage of the Inauguration of the 47th President of the United States: Donald J. Trump.
Yours truly and former Congressman George Santos is going to provide team coverage of the Inauguration on our website: SouthShorePress.com.
Be sure to follow us on Twitter at @SSPNewsroom as well as Facebook at @TheSouthShorePress.
There you will see videos, news, and information in real-time from The South Shore Press.
This type of multi-media coverage didn’t exist when I got my first job reporting at WSTM-TV in 1993. We banged out our stories on electric typewriters. No, we could not even use those fancy typewriters that had the automatic ribbon with the whiteout that could quickly correct mistakes.
There was zero possibility of even using a word processor that had a tiny computer screen on the keyboard, and you hit “enter” to type out your words without errors or mistakes.
Nope.
Many moons ago television stations used five-part, carbon, color coded paper to type scripts on. This was done with multiple colors because of the people who needed specific scripts. The person responsible for the teleprompter of the newscast was white, a producer got the green copy, one anchor got yellow, the other news anchor got pink, and the Director got a different color as well.
It was actually someone’s job to take the white scripts, cut them with scissors, and tape them together in one massive, connected script. It was then manually fed into what can only be described as a script conveyor belt with a camera pointing down at the end.
The prompter person then scrolled this conveyor belt, a smaller version of those you see in the grocery store, then cranked the belt so the scripts moved forward to then go from that small camera to the studio cameras. There you go, that’s how old-school teleprompters worked.
Since the scripts were multiple sheets of paper divided by carbon, you couldn’t white out or go back on a script to make a correction. No one liked doing it, but the worst case scenario was going back and typing capital “XXXX” over a mistake.
Things have changed quite considerably concerning the coverage of big breaking news events in 1993 when I was a rookie reporter compared to now in 2025.
So starting this Friday, I won’t file stories the old-fashioned way on a typewriter or “call them in” to an editor back in the newsroom where they would type it out verbatim.
Be sure to follow us on Twitter (@SSPNewsroom) and Facebook (@TheSouthShorePress) and of course check out our website regularly for updates: SouthShorePress.com.
You’ll be able to get real-time, live updates from this historic inaugural event. And next week, keep an eye out for our Special Inaugural Print Edition we are going to produce. The Dean of South Shore Reporters Bob Chartuk, and reporters Mike Reistetter and Deborah Williams will handle inauguration coverage from Long Island.
We have D.C. covered. See you online and on social media this week.