The death of the telegram could not have been less
ceremonial. It might have gone completely unnoticed except for a few
papers.
The Telegraph in Nashua, N.H. saw a story about it on a Web site called LiveScience.com.
LiveScience.com reported last week:
After 145 years, Western Union has quietly stopped sending telegrams.
On the [Western Union] company's Web site, if you click on "Telegrams" in the left-side navigation bar, you're taken to a page that ends a technological era with about as little fanfare as possible:
"Effective January 27, 2006, Western Union
will discontinue all Telegram and Commercial Messaging services. We
regret any inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you for your
loyal patronage. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact
a customer service representative."
I love the delicious irony of a newspaper called The Telegraph
picking up this story. The Telegraph recognizes the real story behind
this story. It's is the story of the passing of an iconic image
now replaced by cell phones and e-mails. Telegrams were an iconic
touchstone for people. They announced deaths, engagements, business deals, congratulations and condolences.
Bloomberg News, The Associated Press and the New York Daily News covered the occasion, too. The Telegraph included stories of telegrams that changed people's lives. There is clearly a local story in this for you. You know your readers and viewers have telegrams in their scrapbooks; your libraries and historical societies have historic telegrams in their collections.
The Telegraph story said [free registration required]:
Western Union, whose
little slips of paper brought the news of Civil War dead, of first
flight at Kitty Hawk and millions of smaller moments that held
families together, has turned off the wire.
Western Union
quietly shut down its telegram service at the end of last week, leaving
behind millions of yellow messages pasted into scrapbooks.
Although it started closing down hand-delivery in 1972, Western Union continued to take messages by telephone, delivering them by next-day mail until Friday. Now Western Union focuses on wire transfers, prepaid telephone cards and other financial
services. The death of the telegram wasn't announced at all except by a
message posted Friday on the company's Web site. The day after First
Data Corp. said it would sell Western Union to shareholders.
"The decision to end messaging services is a reflection of the evolution of the Western Union. It is the first transformation of a communications company to a financial services company," a company spokesman, Victor Chayet, told The Telegraph on Wednesday.
Begun in 1844 with Massachusetts
artist-inventor Samuel Morse's first telegram -- a Biblical quotation,
"What hath God wrought!" -- the first form of instant messaging
withstood the advent of the telephone, the radio and the fax machine.
It came on paper and, since 1933, in the form of singing telegrams. But
it died in the era of e-mail, cell phones and nearly free long-distance
phone calls.
The story adds:
Because telegrams
were priced by length, they encouraged short messages -- and little
punctuation. Senders saved money by using the "stop" instead of periods
to end sentences, because punctuation was extra.
In the 1920s and '30s, Western Union had a fleet of 14,000 uniformed messenger boys and girls on foot and bicycle.
Last year it sent only 20,000 telegrams worldwide, Chayet said.
The peak years were probably during World War II, Chayet said, when America's War Department used it to bring mostly somber news of soldiers' deaths to their families.
The story includes this passage, too:
The power of the
telegram was represented more than a few times on the big screen, as
well. For dramatic purposes, bad news typically came from telegrams in
the movies. In "Summer of '42," a telegram informed Dorothy that her
soldier husband had been killed in World War II.
To lighten up the company's reputation for delivering bad news, a Western Union executive named George Oslin introduced the "singing telegram" in 1933. The first one was sung for singer Rudy Vallee by a Western Union operator with an improbable name, Lucille Lipps.
I remember the evening that my sister graduated from high school and my great aunt sent a telegram of congratulations. A
taxi driver delivered it to the school gym. I thought it was just about
the coolest thing ever. An e-mail with flashing smiley faces doesn't
have that kind of heart.
Friday Is D-Day for Nasty Computer Worm
A
lot of folks may be wishing for the good old days of telegrams today
when a computer worm that infiltrated hundreds of thousands of PCs last
month may awaken. With e-mail subject lines
that read "the best video clip ever," "give me a kiss" and "school girl
fantasies gone bad," the worm urges computer users to open an attached
file.
Newsfactor.com said:
Blackworm, Nyxem-D,
and W32.Blackmail.E, among others. There are disagreements in the
security industry about the severity of the worm, with Symantec and
F-Secure taking different positions on the issue.
Experts on such things say this worm may destroy documents and files on infected machines and networks. Microsoft warns users to protect themselves with up to date virus protection programs and protection scans from the Microsoft Web site.
The Washington Post said:
The
worm, variously named "Nyxem.D," "MyWife.E," "Blackmal.E" and the
"Kama Sutra worm" by different antivirus companies, is a ticking time
bomb that on the third day of each month will seek out and delete a
wide range of file types found on infected Windows computers, including
any Adobe PDF files and Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents,
among others.
Depressed Kids
The Seattle Times offers a gutsy piece on teen depression which, according to the Surgeon General, affects 5 percent of children and adolescents:
The average length of
a depressive episode runs from seven to nine months, according to the
Surgeon General's report. But people who are diagnosed with depression
as children are more likely to have another depressive episode in their
lifetime, according to the report; as many as 40 percent will relapse
within two years, and 70 percent will relapse by adulthood.
Childhood
depression can be hard to detect. Some parents dismiss depressive
behavior as the mood swings that come with growing up. Some kids don't
know how to describe what they're feeling, or fear they will be
rejected as different if they do.
But there are serious
risks that come with depression. Most children who suffer from it also
have another mental disorder, whether it's related to substance abuse
or anti-social behavior, according to the Surgeon General's report.
Depression is also a significant risk factor for suicide, particularly
among girls.
The story continued:
The (Washington)
state's most recent Healthy Youth Survey gives some insight into the
scope of the problem. The survey asked a random sampling of about
185,000 students about their feelings and behavior.
Nearly 30 percent of
the eighth-graders who answered the survey said they felt sad or
hopeless almost every day in the past two weeks.
About 1 in 7 said they had seriously considered suicide in the past 12 months.
There are a number of organizations that work toward
increasing an understanding of adolescent and childhood depression. You
might find some of these resources and previous stories helpful:
Schools Watch Student Online Journals
We have hit on this one a couple of times before, but The Christian Science Monitor
ran a nice piece about how schools are trying to figure out how much
they should monitor what kids write online when they're not at school. The story
points out that a recent study
by the Pew Internet & American Life Project showed that 1 in 5 kids
between the ages of 12 and 17 -- about 4 million -- keeps a blog. About
twice that many regularly read them.
We are always looking for your great ideas. Send Al a few sentences and hot links.
Editor's Note: Al's Morning Meeting is a
compendium of ideas, edited story excerpts and other materials from a
variety of Web sites, as well as original concepts and analysis. When
the information comes directly from another source, it will be
attributed and a link will be provided whenever possible. The column is
fact-checked, but depends on the accuracy and integrity of the original
source. Errors and inaccuracies found will be corrected.
As a young reporter for the Winnipeg Free Press 40...
