[GreenKeys] TTYs in news service

[John Nagle]

> I've been looking through a few copies from TTYs that were from news
> service and I'm wondering if there were standard rules for transmissions
> or did it vary from source to source?  What I'm specifically looking for
> is field work and other internal work such as story drafts and such.
> There doesn't seem to be too much of this documented, but maybe I'm
> just not looking in the right place.

     Even today, Reuters stories have a headline length limit that
will fit on a Teletype.

     If you want current stories, you can get them from the Reuters
RSS feed:

     http://feeds.reuters.com/reuters/topNews?format=xml

The Reuters feed is a good source; each story is about five lines,
not just a headline.  Most other news feeds are just headlines or the
first few words of each story, intended for use with programs that let
you click on a link.  NPR's feed, though, "http://www.npr.org/rss/rss.php?id=1012",
is also story-like enough to be useful.  Let me know if you find any
other good feeds.

    I have a Python program I keep running which polls the Reuters RSS feed
and drives a Model 15 Teletype.  Each time Reuters puts up a new story,
the Teletype starts up, types it out, and shuts down again.  This works
for any RSS feed; the format is standardized.  RSS is designed for this
type of polling; there's a low-overhead way to ask if the feed has changed.

    I do some basic text processing to make the output look reasonable.
Unicode is converted to ASCII, HTML markup is removed, all white space
is converted to single spaces, word wrap is applied to break the lines
at word boundaries, and a preliminary translation to a smaller character
set is performed.  This last converts "[" to "(", "%" to " PCT. ", and
such.  Finally the ASCII text is fed to ASCII->Baudot translation,
which does the machine handling (CR, LF, LTRS, etc.)

    The result gives the impression of a classic news Teletype.

    This will probably go on display in a museum in the future,
once I build a glass case for the machine to show off the works.
I have contacts at the Exploratorium and the Computer Museum.

> I'd also like to see if there is an archive of wire service news.

     The Stanford AI Lab used to receive the AP wire on their
SAIL computer, as a source of text.  The backup tapes from
that machine were transcribed to newer media over the years,
and a few years ago were copied to disk archives at IBM Almaden
by Bruce Baumgard of the Internet Archive and some others.
Somewhere in there is probably an archive of the AP wire.
But there would be copyright clearance problems.  How badly
do you need this info?

				John Nagle