Brave new world

Today was the annual staff meeting at work. I work at a newspaper, whoops, I mean Information Center. The meeting is where the editorial department director outlines the plans for the upcoming year to a bunch of abrasive smart asses who reflexively distrust authority. I would not want to manage journalists.
But what we talked about is that almost everything about how we do our jobs will be changing. And fast. The not-very-well kept secret of the industry is that the processed tree pulp product we put on porches every day is going buh-bye in the next couple decades. So, newspapers are scrambling to find platforms to replace it. That means online, interactive, etc. At the Register Star, reporters are going to learn how to shoot and edit video and audio, and I'm looking forward to it. No more dawdling on a story until the afternoon deadline, since Web publishing means we can break news 24 hours a day. And that allows us to run our only competitors, the TV stations ragged on a regular basis. So that's kind of fun.