They did indeed. What’s more, no one was particularly bothered by it. Admittedly, a two-week wait was rather long, but the weekly publishing schedule from August 1986 onwards was perfectly acceptable. Life moved at a slightly less hectic pace than it does today – though not in the Observant office itself. Deadlines were strict. The paper had to be available in university buildings by Friday (later Thursday), and the lengthy articles we tended to write in those days all had to reach a bleak industrial estate in Heerlen the day before. Not by post, but hand-delivered by the assistant to the editors or one of the editors. They would drive or take a train or bus to the printer, Het Limburgs Dagblad, which produced far more publications than just its own newspaper. The typed pages were then retyped on large typesetting machines, which cast lines of lead type used to print the paper column by column.
Hub
And then there was Hub, pronounced “Huub” – the good-natured newspaper designer who would take a sharp knife to all those columns, assembling each page with the editor on duty. Line by line, paragraph by paragraph, everything was rearranged to create a presentable page, with photos and advertisements supplied separately. But Hub did not have an easy time with Observant. He’d spend the morning painstakingly laying out the paper, only for things to grind to a halt after lunch because of a missing article, or photo, or both. Back in Maastricht, someone would still be typing up a piece that would only arrive in Heerlen late in the afternoon. Frustration all round – for Hub, who should already have been working for another client or even on his way home, and for the editor-in-chief, who either pleaded for leniency or angrily demanded it. On occasion, the paper wasn’t distributed on Friday but only at the beginning of the following week.
Glad to be rid of us
In the late 1980s, along came computers, page layout software and floppy disks. We started laying out the newspaper ourselves. Hub said he was “glad to be rid of us”.
But paper remained paper. The news cycle still covered a full week, and yes, that sometimes felt too long for readers. Copies flew off the racks when something interesting or important had happened – a dismissed dean explaining his side of the story in an interview a week later; faculty budget cuts threatening entire departments with closure; service centres being reorganised once again. Those editions were impatiently awaited, not just by rank-and-file employees wanting to know what was really going on, but also by university administrators hoping the coverage wouldn’t reflect too badly on them.
Academic principles set aside
There were occasional lows, too. Sometimes, Observant published a critical article about a faculty that just so happened to be holding an Open Day that Saturday. On a few occasions, faculty administrators temporarily set aside their academic principles in favour of a marketing mindset and had the copies taken from the racks, to be returned by Monday.
That, at least, is one advantage of publishing exclusively online: no one can pull that kind of stunt anymore.
Wammes Bos, editor at Observant between 1986 and 2018