Rich Salz reminded me of the name of the system I was thinking of -- Atex.  Given my later interactions with their editorial and IT departments, I'm not sure that Carnex was in the production system there (particularly given the Gunkies description).  I never saw it but it could have been before anyone I knew was working there.   By the mid/late 80's, they were using Atex for most things.

FWIW: By the mid/late 1980s, the IBM PC had been out for a few years, and many people had access to DOS systems.  At the Globe, their Atex System had a 300-baud modem on it (and it was 300 baud, not 1200 because the IT folks at the Globe claimed that the Atex required something special about that model modem -- I never knew what -- I've always guessed it was something to do with the maintenance contract not technical but it was not my job -- I just took it as a wonderment and dealt with it).

But the big feature Atex offered the Globe was it allowed the reporters to upload and spool their stories, and then the Atex set the type for the editors independent of the filing. But the reporters had to file their story using a very rigid format convention that they all hated (i.e., ask humans to conform to the needs of the computer, not the other way round).  By then, most of the reporters used a PC and a simple word processor to edit and then upload to Atex via a terminal emulator program such as ProComm or Kermit.

The Atex side was exceedingly dumb and unforgiving.  If the user or the system made any error, Atex would toss the story (i.e., not put anything in the spool), and there was no communications protection so that line noise could cause issues. I never saw their side, but I gather Atex was not too friendly to the editors,  as there was no way to find out what had been accepted remotely, so they often had to ask the reporters to file the stories multiple times. 

My sister was working as an occasional stringer for them, given her statehouse connections.  I got her to get me the specs for the Atex input system, and I wrote some scripts for her to use the Masscomp box to prep her stories for them and send them off to the Atex System.   I became an informal help desk for several of her reporter and photographer friends. :-)   I have some interesting stories WRT to all that - but they are not particularly computer-based -- the Richard Reed (the shoe bomber) story and its famous picture you have all undoubtedly seen is one of my favorites.

Clem