The Newseum — a museum on the history of news — is about to reopen in a big new space in Washington, D.C., and one of its exhibits got me thinking.

It’s a pair of slippers used by a blogger.

They symbolize how folks who shuffle from bed to computer to post thoughts online are becoming as much a part of global news content as the professional media.

It made me realize the changes in my business say a lot about far broader changes.

I have to admit, I didn’t see them coming.

I got my first reporting job in 1974 on the Utica Daily Press in upstate New York. It was a two-newspaper town, one of hundreds nationally. Today, there are fewer than 20.

We used typewriters, of course. To keep the pages of our stories from getting mixed up, we rubber-cemented them bottom-to-top into long vertical banners. I had an editor named Don Drumm who would make you cut a story if it was taller than he was. Fortunately, he was about 6-foot-3.

All stories had to be rekeyboarded by linotype operators so they could be set in type roughly the same way Ben Franklin did it 200 years before. That’s why we had to circle every “not” with a pen. You didn’t want a tired lynotyper to mistakenly leave one out in a sentence such as, “The senator said he did not take bribes.”

For reasons I never learned, we would type “-30-” at the bottom of each story to mark the end.

By the time I arrived at The Providence Journal in 1976, we had to type stories with exact spacing so that a futuristic “reader” could zip over the words and transfer them electronically into the production system. No more rekeyboading. It was amazing technology. I figured the geniuses who invented it would be rich. But they lost their shirts within a year or so because of a new concept called desktop computing that made “readers” obsolete.

Around 1980, A company called Apple put a computer store in Warwick aimed at everyday consumers. I went to write a column about it. I doubted the product would succeed. It seemed a good way to avoid using white-out, but aside from typing, what would you need a personal computer for?

My column appeared only in the afternoon newspaper, The Evening Bulletin, which was almost double the size of the morning Journal. Evening papers thrived in blue collar towns, where factory workers did the 6 a.m. shift and didn’t have time for the news until they got home.

But as manufacturing went overseas, and service jobs soared, evening circulation trended down.

Meanwhile, soon after a failed bid for a second America’s Cup in Newport in 1980, Ted Turner went back to Atlanta and founded a 24-hour TV news channel. It was on a system called “cable TV” that began to draw an increasing share of advertising. Between the likes of CNN and a faster pace of life, people had less time and need for an evening paper. Those newspapers began to die out in droves.

For years, we typed on computer terminals linked to a central processor. Then we moved to desktop computers on a network. Today, I type on a laptop that I can take with me on the road if need be. On Oct. 1, 1975, I remember standing in the teletype room of the Utica Daily Press, watching dispatches filed on each round of Muhammad Ali’s “Thrilla in Manila.” That fight was on TV, but with most news, those teletypes were a rare first glimpse reserved for newspaper people. Today, anyone with the Internet can get that and much more in an instant in his or her home.

When I first came to The Journal, most people’s communication expenses consisted of a newspaper and a phone line. Combined, they cost about $25 a month. Today, many folks also have cable TV, high-speed Internet and a family plan of cell phones with pricey texting and data plans. There are annual bills for virus and spyware protection. There’s printer ink. And many of us have had to hire professional geeks to fix glitches or install routers. Add it up, and many people now pay hundreds of dollars a month for communication costs instead of $25. That’s another reality newspapers are up against. And did I mention you can now read many newspapers on your cell phone? I couldn’t do that in Utica.

Reporters still come to newsrooms every day and write stories under deadline. But we no longer have to wait days to hear back from readers by snail-mail. Often, I’ll get midnight e-mail responses from readers who caught my work online the night before the paper hit the doorstep. Many of those e-mails are from places such as Florida and California, where expatriate Rhode Islanders still keep up with The Journal on their computers. But it’s a crowded newsstand, with millions of other Web sites competing for “eyeballs.”

We’re an industry in transition, with American newspapers having lost thousands of reporters to buyouts and layoffs in the last few years alone. No one knows how it’ll all turn out.

In one sense, it’s a far more vibrant information age.

But I have to admit, I sometimes miss rubber-cementing my story pages together.

And if you’ll allow me one nostalgic indulgence, I’m going to end this column the old way.

“-30-”

mpatinkin@projo.com