We've had some journalism students in the office over the past few weeks for a spot of experience.
They are an absolute whizz on putting together video and audio and think nothing of sourcing stories from websites, Facebook and Twitter.
Nothing wrong with that, but sometimes the good, old-fashioned method of wearing some shoe leather out on the streets is the only way to get things done.
And that inevitably ends up with the likes of me, and one or two others, harking back to the days when we were trainees.
One of our students couldn’t quite get their head around how we used to get a paper out without modern technology. And, to be honest, by the end of the history lesson, neither could we.
When I first started as a cub reporter, computers weren’t part of a newsroom. Reporters wrote on typewriters, everything double-spaced and in triplicate – top copy for the editor, second copy for the subs and a copy for you.
When computers arrived, the screens were clunky. All you could do was type green letters on a black screen and how it ever appeared in print, with pictures alongside, I never really understood.
By the time I joined the KM Group, computers were part of everyday life, but technology was still a shadow of what it was today.
We worked on the daily paper, Kent Today, and would dash out first thing to a job, phone our copy back from a phone box (when was the last time you called the operator and reversed the charges?) and any borrowed photos had to be driven to our head office in Larkfield and put through the company’s only scanner.
And we were ahead of the rest. Just how did we do it? With grit and determination and the fear of missing a deadline.
On Friday, I stood watching HMS Ocean sailing up the River Thames. We had three reporters on scene – one taking pictures, two shooting video on smartphones, and, within a very short space of time, it was published on our website.
So what’s changed? Just the deadline. The grit and determination is always there. It’s just the deadline that’s moved.
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