The new year marks a time of transition for the Snoqualmie Valley Record.

On Wednesday, Jan. 6, the 97-year-old newspaper will change formats. Instead of an 11-by-20-inch broadsheet, the newspaper will follow a tabloid format, measuring about 10 by 13 inches. The format change coincides with a broader distribution model, allowing papers to be sent to more than 12,000 Valley residents.

The history of the Snoqualmie Valley Record is a story of change. Each editor and publisher presided over changes, big and small. As the Valley developed, so did the newspaper. New ways of creating a newspaper freed up time and resources for news coverage.

Seventy-five years ago, the front page of the Record was a place for obituaries, movie showings and the latest gossip on who was coming to visit. By the 1950s, a different mindset was in play. There were still vignettes from advertisers and letters to the editor making their way to the front pages, but coverage also focused on the big stories of the day, from major happenings in neighborhoods and student athletics to regional issues such as floods.

In the 1980s, coverage of the Lower Valley rivaled that of the Upper Valley on the front pages of the Record, with much of the news following the same mix as today: priority was given to schools and public affairs.

Some major changes in the last 30 years included the transition away from hot-wax pasting of pages to computer-created newspapers, the transition to full color pages, and the switch from film to digital cameras.

Record’s history

The first incarnation of what would later be known as the Snoqualmie Valley Record, then known as the North Bend Post, was published by B.N. Kennedy on Oct. 16, 1913.

Over the years, the weekly went by a myriad of names, including the Snoqualmie Post, Valley Record, and North Bend Valley Record. The current name stuck in 1924.

Until about 40 years ago, the former owner, Falls Printing Co., published as many as four newspapers in the Valley. Two in the Upper Valley, the North Bend and Snoqualmie Valley Records, were essentially the same product, with the front pages showing different stories pertinent to each city. The company also put out the Issaquah Valley Record and the Carnavall Reporter, covering Carnation and Duvall.

Falls Printing Co. and the Valley Record became separate business operations in 1996, after Karen and Jim McKiernan bought the business. In Dec. 2000, the newspaper was sold to King County Journal Newspapers, owned by the Horvitz family. They published several newspapers, including the King County Journal. In 2006, the company was sold to Black Press of Canada, and a new chapter started for the Valley Record. The current publisher, William Shaw, took the reins of the paper in October of 2008.

Until the mid-1960s, the paper was printed on a press inside the Record’s Snoqualmie offices. For much of the paper’s history, the columns of text were created using a Linotype machine, which creates slugs of metal type containing a line of text. By the late 1970s, the Linotype had been replaced by a process in which newspaper pages were pasted together using hot wax, then photographed to create a negative. Final newsprint pages were printed from a template made from the negative.

Today, the Record is laid out on Macintosh computers, using a program called InDesign. Finished documents are sent electronically to Everett, where they are printed. News stories and photograph processing are all handled on computer, although the rough pages are printed and eyed by the editorial staff during the proofreading process, ensuring that a physical replica of the newspaper is still part of the production process.

Times change

“I’ve seen so much change in newspaper production in the last 25 years,” said former Record editor Dave Workman. “It’s been astounding, some of the advances we’ve made.”

A North Bend resident and current senior editor at Gun Week magazine, Workman edited the paper from 1973 to 1979.

Long before computers, Workman banged out the news on a Remington typewriter and pasted up pages on wax with then-owners Bob Soister and Gaylord Buchman.

“They were pretty fast at what they did,” Workman remembered of the owners.

“We used to have a brutal Tuesday in there,” Workman said. “We had to stand there and paste up pages. I did the editorial page and the front page.”

“Hot wax was a weird process,” Workman said. “We would put these blocks of wax into the machine. You had to wait for it to melt. If you got too much wax on the back of the galley proof (page), the wax would soak through and make a big blotch. You’d have to redo the whole thing.”

Cameras used film, and Workman got a lot of good out of his old Yashica twin-lens reflex camera.

“We made it an exciting paper,” he said. “We tried to use good photos.

In those days, many weeklies printed on marginal newsprint stock. Without care, the ink would smear or bleed through.

The owners made a point of replacing dirty copies with better-printed ones, making special trips to vendors to make sure their papers were the best.

“Weeklies all faced that potential,” Workman said. “We wanted a clean-looking newspaper. The Record always did look really clean.”

Heavy metal

Before hot wax and photo-based production, the Valley Record’s pages were made using slugs of metal type created on a Linotype.

Snoqualmie resident Gloria McNeely, associate editor at the Valley Record from 1953 to 1962, remembers the era technological changes were slowly eroding the Linotype’s role.

“Everything that you now see on the computer was done by a Linotype operator until it became obsolete,” McNeely said.

When a column of type was ready, the staff would “pull a proof,” pressing paper over the metal in a physical process similar to how credit card purchases used to be done. McNeely would then proofread that page before the final run.

“Typos were corrected as they are now,” she added. Nowadays, fixing the error requires the stroke of a key. Back then, the fix could require molten metal.

Finished slugs of metal formed a heavy tray. If someone accidentally dropped a tray, the slugs could fall out or scatter.

“When a tray was dumped, everyone was in a panic,” McNeely said. “Sometimes, a typographical error would sneak by.”

Living color

The newspaper started running spot color in the late 1970s, with the occasional full-page ads in red and color headlines on the front. Photos were still black and white.

Under Jim McKiernan’s leadership, the newspaper went through several dramatic changes in its look and production.

McKiernan, publisher from 1996 to 2008, recalls the transition to full-color fronts in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

“We did the first color front in about 1998,” he said. “It was a pumpkin picture. It took us a while to figure out how to do it.”

Regular color fronts began on April 19, 2001.

Another big change was the switch to digital cameras. Before the advent of digital, photos were processed in the paper’s darkroom — which no longer exists. Going digital saved 10 hours of effort a week.

In 2001, the paper narrowed by about an inch. Most readers didn’t mind.

“As long as the news is good, people don’t care what format it is in,” McKiernan said.