From laptops to cyberspace, the newsroom of the '90s isn't what it used to be.

Bit by bit, the silent wonder of high tech has taken over from the typewriter.

About the only thing that hasn't changed in newsrooms: Some days it still seems like a miracle the paper ever gets published.

But these days the "miracle" has more to do with data transmission than divine intervention.

And to think it's all for a centuries-old product, about the only one still delivered to doorsteps every day of the year.

"The technological advances in this business have been incredible, and I don't see them stopping now," Denver Rocky Mountain News publisher Larry Strutton said. "In the future there's going to be a stronger and stronger marriage between digital technology and print."

Indeed, newspapers and computers already go together like Woodward and Bernstein, and they have for about 25 years.

"The mid-'70s were the transition stage for newspapers," said Daniel Persiani, News vice president of technology and information systems.

"Since then, the technological advancements have allowed us to produce higher quality and more cost-effective papers, and do it faster than we ever thought possible," Persiani said. "It's a whole new world."

In the newsroom of old, hot news was announced by bells ringing on big, metal wire service machines that spewed out the news on long rolls of brown paper line by typewritten line. They were mechanical marvels, and their constant clacking was the background noise for a generation of newspeople.

Now news comes to us silently, sliding into computer queues, where it waits for reporters and editors to call it up on a screen. From there, it can be sent across the room, or around the world, with just a few keystrokes.

And while reporters still sniff around the scene of accidents and pop in and out of offices at city hall, they seldom rush to pay phones and dictate stories to rewrite men (they were almost always men in those days) anymore.

Now they're more likely to ring up the city desk on their cell phones, or pop open a battery-powered laptop computer, write their story on a screen and file from afar. And if they have a wireless modem, they can even do it with their cell phone.

Typewriters, of course, are history. These days the clatter of metal keys is seldom heard in the newsroom.

Stories are written on video display terminals linked to a mainframe computer, or on personal computers that link up as easily to the World Wide Web as the editor's desk a few feet away.

Life isn't what it used to be for photographers, either. Some now use digital cameras and download images from their camera into a computer. That can be done in the newsroom, or the image can be transmitted by laptop from, say, Mile High Stadium, to the newsroom.

Photo editors can then call the images up on a screen, pick one they like and send it directly into the publishing system, bypassing the "hard copy" stage. All but gone are the days when clerks made frenzied "film drops," speeding from the scene with a can of film in hand.

Artists haven't escaped the new age. Instead of the pen and airbrush, newspaper graphic artists now use a Macintosh computer as their electronic palette.

Now, with one hand on a mouse, they paint maps, charts, graphs and illustrations on an electronic canvass.

But the Macs' impact on newspapers goes well beyond their artistic capabilities. They've made it faster and easier to assemble all the elements of a newspaper page.

Photos, graphic art, headlines, stories, fact boxes, charts - they're all assembled on Macs.

But even at such an advanced stage, the business isn't standing still. Computer technology changes so fast that some machines have to be replaced or updated almost every year. Macs, for example, advance so fast it's cost-effective to buy new ones about every 18 months.

Even the newsroom's beloved "morgue" is dead. It's now the library, and instead of clipping papers and filing stories away in envelopes, articles are transmitted to an electronic library in Philadelphia.

With a few keywords and a code, a reporter or librarian anywhere in the world can call up stories from years past in an instant.

One of the biggest changes at the News came in 1992 with the opening of the E.W. Estlow Production Facility, a 400,000-square-foot plant at 5990 Washington St. The plant is firmly rooted in Johann Gutenberg's invention and light years removed at the same time.

The News may be Denver's oldest business, but it uses some of the most modern printing equipment in the world. The News has five Goss Colorliner presses, hulking machines 42 feet, 10 inches high and 113 feet long.

They allow the News to print 65,000 newspapers per hour on each of the presses.

"When I first got here in '90, I spent all my time apologizing for the quality of reproduction," Strutton said. "Now we have advertisers telling us how superior our reproduction is to other papers."

There's an array of new technology at Estlow. Newsprint, in 1-ton rolls, is wheeled about by unmanned vehicles guided by copper wires imbedded in the concrete floor.

The printing system is fully computerized, allowing for late deadlines and early delivery.

Where do we go from here?

"Quite frankly, it's hard to predict because things are moving so fast," Strutton said. "If we were trying to produce the paper today the same way we did 10 years ago, we wouldn't be here. And if we're trying to produce it five years from now the way we are today, we won't be here.

"The good news is, we don't intend to. In this business, you do things fast or die."

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