Newspaper Printing has a rich history of adapting to technological advancements, especially when it comes to incorporating images. Initially, newspapers relied on meticulously crafted wood engravings, each painstakingly hand-copied from photographs. These engravings served as the first photographic images to grace newspaper pages. However, the landscape of newspaper printing underwent a significant transformation by the 1890s with the advent of halftoning. This innovative technique revolutionized the process, mirroring the fundamental principles still in use today for newspaper printing.
Halftoning allowed for the reproduction of varying tones through patterns of small dots, differing in size and spacing. By the 1920s, this technique became quite refined. Although some argued that the artistic quality of hand-engravings still surpassed halftones, the latter offered a crucial advantage: efficiency. Hand-engraving demanded considerable time, artistry, and consequently, higher expenses, making it less practical for the fast-paced world of newspaper production. While more sophisticated ink prints were achievable through processes like photogravure, ideal for high-quality books, their high cost made them unsuitable for mass-market newspaper printing, advertising flyers, or affordable magazines. Newspaper printing needed a cost-effective and rapid solution, which halftoning provided.
The creation of halftones was a fascinating process. It began with re-photographing an original printed photograph through a glass screen etched with a grid of tiny apertures. This was projected onto a film or plate, which was then developed to achieve very high contrast. The result was a dot pattern where the size of each dot corresponded to the intensity of tone in the original photograph. This patterned negative was then used to create a contact print on a metal sheet coated with a light-sensitive material. Upon exposure to light, this material hardened. The unhardened material was washed away, and acid etching was employed to dissolve the exposed metal areas between the dots. This etching process created a printing plate that could be mounted on a printing press, typically fastened to a wood block and integrated with the text for each page layout in newspaper printing.
If you examine a vintage newspaper image closely, perhaps with a magnifying glass or by zooming in on a high-resolution scan, the halftone dots become readily visible. They are a hallmark of early newspaper printing techniques.
Here’s an example from a postcard around 1910, illustrating a simple single-screen halftone process:
Close-up view of halftone dots in a vintage postcard from 1910 showcasing early newspaper printing techniques.
More advanced halftone methods emerged, involving multiple exposures with screens of varying sizes, but these did not gain widespread use until the 1930s, after the initial establishment of halftone newspaper printing. By the 1970s, photo offset printing largely replaced these earlier techniques. Photo offset allowed for the entire page, including text and images, to be photographically transferred to the printing plate. The advent of CMYK printing further enriched newspaper printing by adding color, but the fundamental principle of halftoning – representing tones with dots – remained central. Even today, although often digitally generated, the essence of halftoning persists in newspaper printing and various other print media.
For those keen to delve deeper into the evolution of photography as a tangible art form, Richard Benson’s book, The Printed Picture, offers a comprehensive exploration of printing processes from the Renaissance to the present day. For specific insights into newspaper printing, further research into halftones, letterpress, and offset printing is recommended. Encyclopedia Britannica also provides a valuable article on photoengraving, which elaborates on the processes discussed and their role in the history of newspaper printing.
