A ramble
One of the more interesting aspects of job interviews I enjoy is getting to chat with people above my pay grade, as well as to the lower-level (my level) techies. Yesterday I got to spend a solid hour just chatting with a Managing Director of a firm who’re handling the majority of the European Newpaper Conglomerates’ move from a single publishing stream (journalist → print media) to multiple publishing channels (journalist → digital, print, mobile) and vice-versa (moderated newspaper website comments → newspapers).
He’d been in the newspaper publishing industry for the last 25 years and spent a good amount of time describing how, when he first started, the workers’ unions of the 80’s were heavily against any kind of technology being involved in the printing process, worried as they were about being made redundant. The bit that intrigued me, however, was how he laughingly recalled their ‘antiquated’ views on the evils of technology and how he’d championed digitising the publishing process before spending 10 minutes describing citizen journalism as one of the worst ideas to come out of ‘Web 2.0’.
To my mind he was contradicting himself - speaking of ‘inevitable technology’ while still failing to accept what, I think, is the next ‘inevitable’ next big change in media and publishing.
Any thoughts, internet?
