At my first job we had a machine that was supplied by AP for us to send photos to newspapers on the "wire" and it lookd a lot like this gizmo.
This is How Press Photos Were Transmitted Back in the 1970s
The one we had just used the acoustic coupler and we just snapped the handset into place and hit send. It took a while to transmit a photo and of course it was usually long distance which was expensive. They would sometimes send it back to us with cropping instructions so we could send the biggest photo possible. It was way cool to see a picture I took picked up on buy the Associated Press. Back then UPI was the competitor.
The unit in the web article was newer than ours.