Before Real-Time Reporting

...They were taken in the mid-1970s, in northern Holland, when I was covering the hijacking of a train by South Moluccan militants...

...There is no reality check on the Internet...

...It sounds awful...

...It was the Dutch government, I believe, that provided telephones so that we could dictate our stories and keep in touch with our bureaus...

...They were our lone means of contact from the hijack site...

...Yet correspondents could (and did) cover and file stories...

...In the mid-1980s, I wrote a novel that never got published...

...One of my brothers was living at the farmhouse withme then, and we competed as to how many letters we could each write—and how many replies we received...

...It was all very funny and exotic, that's why the pictures were taken...

...I use, and appreciate, a computer and the Internet every day, and have had an e-mail account for nearly a decade...

...Unfortunately, though my cell phone "roaming" plan allows me to make and receive calls from anywhere in Europe, my own telefonino is of limited use when I am not traveling...

...Nothing came in or went out that wasn't surreptitiously carried by a friend or colleague...

...Nevertheless, communications difficulties often determined the pace and flow of "news," not to mention what was reported altogether...

...The "lines were down" or "blocked" or "blacked out...

...So, since the phone doesn't work at home, I usually forget to keep it charged, and then I forget to take it with me when I go out...

...It was located in the living room of one of the village families, and we became quite friendly as I put through my calls and the phone meter ticked away the units...

...It also lets a caller pretend to be calling from someplace he is not...

...frightening, even...

...Frequently there was a sizable gap between witnessing an event and actually telling the folks at home about it...

...In the developed world, few people actually "dial" a number anymore—even though I recently read that in the developing world billions of people still have never made a phone call...

...My house is one of the few pinpoint pockets in Italy that apparently is not covered by the transmission signal...

...At an election-night party at the Hilton in Vienna, they had direct NBC television, which was another Mondo Bizarro....' The more things change...

...Four More Years...

...I don't want to give the impression, though, that I'm a Luddite...

...People would call from strange places simply to astonish their friends by letting them know where they were able to speak from...

...And in my case it was particularly difficult, for the phone company had to string a considerable length of new cable and requisition land on which to erect telephone poles...

...One of my earliest assignments as an intern at the Associated Press office in Rome, I recalled, was talking nonsense for more than two hours in order to keep a precarious telephone line open to Egypt during Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's first attempt at Middle East shuttle diplomacy...

...At several points the plot turns on the inability of reporters or editors or diplomats in the West to "get through" to people in Romania, and vice versa...

...My Italian Internet server is free—no sign up fees or monthly payments—and my telephone plan gives me a discount on the Internet dial up number...

...Also, with the Web providing an open, instantaneous forum for ideas and opinions, as well as information, the distinctions among news, reportage, opinion, commentary, and journalism blur...

...Just over 40 per cent of Italians use the Internet at home or at work, but according to a recent estimate more than 90 per cent of Italians have cell phones—one of the highest percentages in Europe, if not the highest...

...I remember having a spectacular argument with one of my neighbors, who threatened to bar the phone company from putting up poles on his property...

...I had to go to the village, a little over half a mile up a steep, narrow, rocky dirt road, and use the single public phone there for all my communications...

...I have kept all my correspondence from that time in a thick file...

...Her newest book is Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture In Europe...

...How dated," I thought, as I turned over the slightly yellowed pages...

...But today that type of phone is practically an antique...

...It is astonishing how muchjoumalism has been transformed just in the course of my own career...

...A paragraph in one of the first letters I wrote, to a friend who himself had just returned to ajournalistic desk job after two decades as a foreign correspondent, leaped out at me: "How is suburban life...

...I've just read through some of these letters for the first time in many years...

...At one point I babbled on (and on and on) about my new cat, which I was trying to name, and I decided to call her "International Star" in honor of the experience...

...To my young audience, no doubt, I was describing a universe that, by today's standards of instant connectedness, was virtually suffering a physical disability—that was missing one of its essential senses, like a person who cannot hear or see...

...If the open line were left silent, there was a good chance that an operator, hearing nothing, would cut it off...

...Equally important is the way reporting and communicating themselves have come to be regarded by the public and practitioners...

...By no means...

...That is, the process of taking observed facts, interviews and intuition, assessing their meaning, and putting them together into a coherent piece that illuminates a complex and sometimes dramatic situation...

...It showed a weeping woman talking on a mobile in the middle of a cornfield...

...there was, as the saying went, a "deadline every minute...

...the entire country was somehow cut off, as Poland had been at the onset of martial law...

...It was a world where the wire services were the sole constant, 24/7 sources of news, and they only served their members or paying clients...

...On breaking stories, television news channels tend to transmit raw, unedited footage, voiced over by anchors or reporters who "commentate" on what you and they are seeing—as if they were doing the play-by-play of a live sports match...

...Sometimes journalists were forced to sweet talk hotel switchboard operators or local postal, telephone and telegraph officials into putting them through...

...While cell phone communication has become routine, I still find it amusing, if not rather amazing, that not long ago I had an instant small text message exchange with a friend in Germany, from a ship in the Adriatic Sea, using my Italian cell phone...

...But at that time in Italy, securing a phone was a long, slow, frustrating process...

...I moved here from Vienna, where I had been the UPI chief correspondent for Eastern Europe, just a few days after the 1984 U. S. Presidential election that gave Ronald Reagan a second term...

...The train, with the hijackers and their hostages on board, was far out in the flat Dutch countryside, and we journalists set up a 24-hour stakeout at a police barricade where we slept in our cars...

...Today, with 24hour news channels and the infinite maw of the Internet, there are deadlines every microsecond—for direct public consumption of information, not just for editors and newsdesks...

...It's more practical, and it permits one to phone from anywhere, at any moment of the day,' sociologist Sabino Acquaviva told the Rome newspaper La Repubblica this summer after statistics came out confirming that the telefonino was the preferred way to make a phone call in Italy...

...Here in Italy, where I spend the largest chunk of my time, I live in a farmhouse in the middle of pastures, olive groves and low, wooded mountains...

...So, too, do distinctions among fact, observation, punditry, and prediction, not to mention outright lies...

...It's instant Rashomon, multiplied to the nth degree...

...I told them about a world without cell phones, the Internet, digital cameras, databanks, cable TV, or satellite dishes...

...It will probably be years before I can get a fast connection in my extremely rural area of southern Umbria...

...Sometimes I feel as if I am drowning in immediacy...

...Hanging above my desk are two photographs that strikingly illustrate the distance the craft has traveled...

...In those days I wrote lots of letters...

...The story revolves around Western reporters in Eastern Europe who uncover a conspiracy byrogue CIA and KGB operatives to manipulate an anti-Communist dissident group into staging acts of terrorism...

...I am using one of the rotary phones...

...The often multipage letters describe local doings, the weather, my mood, my prospects, my feelings about my relationship to America, the world, my new rural isolation, and even journalism...

...How is the New Patriotism...

...This is the year I finally really feel like an expatriate...

...The white rotary-dial telephones we got were linked to a local switchboard by long, long, long, cords...

...After the phone lines were eventually restored, instead of a normal dial tone a voice kept repeating, like a mantra, "This conversation is monitored...

...My connection speed is okay, but I would really like to get a fast DSL line...

...I applied immediately to get a phone installed in my own house, of course...

...The problems we faced in northern Holland may now seem rather quaint...

...All too rarely, it seems to me, do they step out ofbreathlessrealtimeandpresentabroader view of the raw material in a way that could be called journalism...

...I'm not referring merely to the mechanics of gathering and filing news, or the fact that the students I addressed in Florence didn't know what a "telex" is...

...Every time I see one of my neighbors answer his phone when he is out picking olives or plowing a field, I think of a New Yorker cartoon that once held pride of place on my refrigerator door...

...Many Italians have given up their fixed-line telephone and only use a telefonino...

...Eighteen months passed before I had a phone installed and working—and the technician from the phone company told me the job was only done so "quickly" because I made a fuss...

...When Poland's Communist authorities imposed martial law in December 1981, the first thing they did was cut both the public telephone lines and the dedicated land lines operated by news services...

...Still, the lag in time between a reporter witnessing a newsworthy occurrence and the actual moment it appeared in print or was heard on the air afforded the opportunity for something that too often seems to get lost in the real-time information world: journalism...

...Standing in tears amid the alien corn.'" That's how it was when cell phones first became available here...

...I happened to pull out the manuscript and reread it this past spring, for the first time in at least 15 years...

...looming, individual trees block my view of the forest, and "insight," "interpretation" and "informed" speculation shoulder aside actual events...

...Other necessary skills for the job included a certain agility while weighed down by pockets full of change for pay phones, and the ability to punch telex tape...

...The caption described the scene as "Ruth and Her New Cordless Telephone" and the woman was shown saying "Nothing much...

...One of the photos shows me, crouched in the middle of a grassy field, speaking on the phone, while behind me a group of reporters stands at the barricade, looking toward the distant train through binoculars and telephoto lenses.The otherpicture (see photo, right) shows me, along with the United Press International photographer on the story, seated on a railway trackthat disappears behind us in the distance...

...I seemed to have shocked them, although all I did was recount some of the changes in the profession since I started out 30 years ago...

...I like to think this was not because of the book's quality, but because I was trying to sell an East-West thriller just as glasnost was breaking out, rendering my Cold War plot obsolete...

...It might then take hours to get another connection...

...From all I read, from all I hear, from all I see, I just don't understand my country anymore, or my fellow countrymen...

...My friends and family still seem to think the way I think people should think, but what about the rest of them...

...I travel a lot and get antsy when I end up someplace where I can't plug in my laptop or find an Internet caf...

...It is advertised all over and is available in most cities, but when I contacted the telephone company here about it they just laughed...

...He is holding a camera with a telephoto lens that must be more than two feet long...

...This can be inconvenient, but when I first moved in, 19 years ago, my house had no telephone at all...

...But the only people breathing down our necks because of those deadlines were editors needing to get out newspapers...

...I have a cell phone too, of course, as does almost everybody in Italy by now...

...To be sure, when I worked for the wire services we had to be fast and we aspired to be first...

...Cell phones (and, indeed, laptop computers, home fax machines, even touchtone telephones) existed largely in science fiction stories...

...Ruth Ellen Gruber is a regular NL contributor...