The Great Debate UK
from Reuters Editors:
Typewriters, Technology and Trust
Dean Wright is Global Editor, Ethics, Innovation and News Standards. Any opinions are his own.
A little girl in my family got a typewriter for Christmas.
Not a laptop. Nothing with a screen. A typewriter. The old-fashioned manual kind with a smeary ribbon and keys that stick.
Typewriters had pretty much gone the way of dodo birds, car tail fins and cigar-chomping editors who yell “Stop the Presses” quite some years before my granddaughter was born. But it was the typewriter used by the school-age, aspiring journalist in the movie “Kit Kittredge: An American Girl" that captivated her.
Or maybe it was the way the typewriter was used. In the movie, a tween-ish girl, played winningly by Abigail Breslin ("Little Miss Sunshine"), does old-fashioned journalism and writes stories that help right a wrong in Depression-era Cincinnati. Kit may be young, but in a challenging environment she keeps her wits—and a strong sense of ethics—about her.
