When looking back over the rise and fall of print journalism recently, I gave short shrift to one important aspect of the impact technological breakthroughs had on a significant set of newspaper workers.

Not the editors and reporters. We coasted right through this particular shake-out, in the 1970s and early 1980s. But lots of others did not, and to overlook them is to minimize the earliest staff reductions that eventually led to most journalists also being unemployed.

Compositors operated the linotype machines, on the production side of the business. These were men (almost entirely) who held full-time jobs in an area of the newspaper business that had existed for nearly a century … whose skills became obsolete almost overnight.

These were the people who had working careers in the “hot lead” era of newspapers, which begun around 1890.

I was reminded of this while readying Evelyn Waugh’s amusing take on the newspaper industry, circa the 1930s, a novel entitled Scoop.

Waugh describes the newsroom of his fictional English newspaper, The Daily Beast (yes, the modern website takes it name from that), and in it he evokes the heyday of an era of print that required many more humans to produce a newspaper than it would over the course of the final few decades of the 20th century.

The compositors. The proof readers. The copy boys. Receptionists, telephone operators, cafeteria workers, mail room workers.

In Waugh’s book, he populates newsrooms with all of these other people, and the hustle and bustle of all these additional co-workers is a reminder of how much of group effort was needed to produce a newspaper, back then. It nearly required a “village” to get out The Daily Miracle, as some liked to think of daily journalism.

The people who held these (mostly) blue-collar jobs were some of the first to be made redundant by computers, as newspapers moved to computers and “cold” type.

It probably is fair to say that those who were hit hardest by the end of the “hot lead” era were the compositors — the linotype operators.

At the San Bernardino Sun, I missed by a few months the actual shift from hot lead to cold type and the dislocation it must have caused in the lives of a couple of dozen working professionals. Thinking back I can see how it impacted communities, and certainly the lives of these very important (until they weren’t) people.

At The Sun, once we had gone to cold type, the people down in “photo comp” were mostly middle-aged guys, most of them in their 40s, who just recently had been part of a fraternity of linotype operators who took great pride in their work and felt themselves a key part of the newspaper.

Indeed, it was common for the compositors who, in theory, were focused on the casting of lead into headlines and type, while reading type backwards (so it would appear correct when imprinted on paper) to find mistakes made by editors or reporters, and to correct them.

The Sun didn’t put all of them on the street. Some shifted into the new production mode, which required very little technical training and soon became a preserve of cheaper-to-employ part-timers.

Instead of sitting at their linotype machines doing a job no one else could do without a lot of training and practice, they became the guys who took the rubbery pages of cold type, ran it through a waxing machine, and then used X-acto knives to cut out the heads and stories, and manually placed them on a page.

Only later did I gain a sense of what must have been the disruption in the lives of the men who had gone through the shift from hot lead to cold type. Their skills became irrelevant and their jobs turned into work easily performed by college kids or young adults.

Some of the veterans surely were laid off or quit. Because all these changes in production were sold to publishers as a savings of labor costs and overhead.

I’m going to make up a number and say newspapers shed 25 or 30 percent of their work force when cold type came in. It didn’t hit journalists, but it certainly smashed into a lot of other people who had been crucial performers.

(For some reason, I think of the kids who went around filling glue pots so that editors could glue wire copy to a headline order. Those jobs disappeared when cold type came in, too.)

It strikes me that newspapers across the U.S. probably closed their cafeterias about then — because they didn’t need to prepare dinner for all those production people who no longer had night jobs.

More innovations cost more jobs, but journalists rode the top of that wave for another 25-plus years — overseeing the “paste-up” process that would have been handled by compositors, and later taking on “pagination”, which produced entire camera-ready pages on a screen in the newsroom.

It probably could be argued that the rising salaries journalists enjoyed in the 1990s, in particular, were at least in part because newspapers had saved so much money by shedding lots and lots of employees who once bestrode what was an enormous gap between typed stories and newspapers coming off a press.

Dozens, perhaps hundreds of people at every decent-sized newspaper found out that what looked like a lifelong career was anything but, and the economic dislocation …

The rest of us felt it, eventually, killed by a different sort of technology, the internet.

Perhaps only then could the no-longer-working journalists look back and recall how this and that department went dark before out turn in the barrel came up.

I apologize for not thinking of this sooner. Newspapers of 50 years ago were a lot more than just reporters and editors.