Dice Man

Joe Gill

What does it mean to be a journalist these days, especially a production journalist or subeditor? As the creator of a board game in the age of the Xbox and Twitter, I have set myself against the technological revolution. Not because I'm against new technology - I love the internet. But I mostly use it as a communication and research tool, for which it is fantastic.

But as someone who works in an industry - the media - that is dominated by technological change, I sometimes feel like old craftsmen at the beginning of the industrial revolution. Is it feasible to be a journalist who is not also a search analyst or web designer/developer? Look what happened to the printers who used to work in lead and type. They had to learn how to do it with computers or join the miners and steelworkers on the scrapheap.

There has been some comment about how hard it is for the new generation of journalists. But they at least have the advantage of growing up in the internet age. For them, to learn how to make search, web design or digital marketing part of their skill set makes perfect sense. They don't remember how it was before technology destroyed the cosy world of the journalistic craft. People of my generation came into this industry when it was on the cusp of change. My first news room still had typewriters and ceefax machines. There was even a metal spike for rejected stories! Moving over to desktop publishing programmes was what us subeditors had to do in the 1990s to stay employable. In the 2000s it is learning how to work online. Subediting became content editing. I love working in the digital domain, it makes actual newsprint seem fusty - it's in near real time rather than last week time. But when everything happens on Twitter, and everyone is chasing the same stories and re-spinning them, rather than spending time investigating and talking to contacts - then journalism just becomes content production.

This can easily become just another facet of marketing. Why should you spend ages getting a genuine scoop, when what your editors and owners really need is quantity - of unoriginal content? Ultimately, you might as well go the whole hog and become an expert in click through and meta data. Who's got time to read an in depth article anyway? There's so much to read, in depth becomes a 10-second scan, about 140 characters long.

So all of this proves that I am a Luddite. Except I am not. I am just experiencing the discomfort of a technological revolution. I work with digital marketers to put About Time into the digital space. Reality in a digital media age is constant change, total measurability and a general feeling that there is nothing solid now that will still be solid in a year's time.

I guess I'll sign up to learn some new skills - I just hope they don't become redundant before I've finished learning them.