BY THE TIME you read this, Aertel might well be dead.
Following through on a promise made in a strategy document published in 2019, RTÉ will pull the plug on its teletext service today. The national broadcaster is stepping out of the teletext game as part of a longstanding “need to prioritise the delivery of digital services to meet growing audience demand”.
Before Google, Aertel served as the closest thing the average person had to a search engine. A source of cinema listings, flight prices and information, sports results, news headlines, quizzes, even birthday messages complete with a teletext cake graphic.
“It was back at a time when it was cutting edge technology,” says TV and radio journalist Teena Gates, who spent around 18 months working for the Aertel news service in its heyday.
“Aertel was really breaking ground. It felt as if we were on a fast track to new technology. I smile when I say I felt cutting edge at the time, but I did.” Aertel was formally launched in 1987, 11 years before the launch of Google.
Primarily it served as a newswire for the public, with journalists in the Aertel office processing and inputting stories from RTÉ’s central news computer.
With that much news to collate, the work was bound to be intense. Gates described 12-hour shifts at the Aertel coalface, reflecting with surprise that RTÉ workers’ unions of the day agreed to the conditions – though it did come with four days off a week for salaried employees.
“There was no walking around or moving off to other areas, it was data input the whole time. Checking stories, writing stories,” Gates says.
“There wasn’t an awful lot of conversation amongst us because we were head down. You had to be very careful about your spelling, about your punctuation, everything had to be checked… So, it was quite intense work and you were highly concentrating all the time. I don’t remember making friends per sé. It was a lovely atmosphere, don’t get me wrong, but we were busy.”
Gates speaks about her time at Aertel as having helped sharpen certain journalistic skills. “It certainly made you very good at headline-writing,” Gates said, referring to the need to fit every Aertel news headline into exactly 33 characters. “The headlines created quite a lot of amusement among us.”
Other high-profile journalists, like Katie Hannon and Philip Boucher-Hayes, also count themselves as alumni of the service.
I found it! Here’s Eamon Farrell and myself toiling away at the #Aertel coalface. Note the cutting edge technology. Not sure of the exact date but it appears that Stephen Hendry has just beaten Jimmy White in the snooker. Great memories of Aertel and all who sailed in her. https://t.co/5p0PSZcNDM pic.twitter.com/oUauHKGbXE
— Katie Hannon (@KatieGHannon) October 3, 2023
For the public, Aertel’s value was beyond question for many years, serving as the most immediate source of up-to-date information available to a public that did not carry the entire history of human knowledge around in its pocket.
While younger generations may associate Aertel with bright green graphics that look like The Matrix moving in (very) slow motion, there is no doubting the role it played in modernising Ireland. Even when contrasted with much more modern forms of media, it’s easy to see the charm of teletext.
In the lead-up to its demise, others have pointed out that Aertel was a useful tool for the LGBTQ community in rural Ireland via its Personal ad section. Aertel provided traffic updates, weather updates, CAO point listings. Even as recently as 2020, there was a code on Aertel through which users could access public health information relating to Covid.
Nobody was thinking about Aertel before RTÉ called its number earlier this month, but maybe there are things about it we should miss.
When buffeted with misinformation on such a wide-scale, it is harder to turn ones nose up at the idea of several journalists ferreted away, making sure they produce inch-perfect news. Increasingly, readers rifle through social media posts for their news, often lost in a sea of competing content and false news. The messier the web becomes, the cleaner that services such as Aertel begin to look.
“We were very accurate, very high quality. We had to be. I remember it with fondness and nostalgia,” Gates says. “It was a great little service.”
Still, she is clear-eyed when asked if it will be missed. “Ach, no. Not with everything we have to replace it,” she says. “But I do think it played a very important role when it was there and it was a very vital service for a lot of people.”
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