Newspapers in The Land That Time Forgot

YOU’D think that, after 15 years in the job, nothing would surprise me when it comes to a newspaper office and how it’s run.

But I came across one office recently which seemed to be like something out of the cult 70’s dinosaur movie The Land That Time Forgot.

They had a really old picture archive system that seemed to rely more on looking through endless sheets of paper rather than a computerised archive.

They did their stories in Word, printed the story out for the editor to read, he’d make the amends on the paper and pass it back to the reporter. Ever heard of doing amends on a computer?

Instead of relying on PDFs of the pages to find old stories, they keep printouts of their stories in big stacks of A4 paper.

Now, this remanant of a bygone age may seem quaint. It might even sound lovable to the nostalgic.

But it got me thinking – if some journalists are still operating paper-driven offices that have barely changed since the 1970s, what hope have they got of grasping so-called new media?

Clearly the companies haven’t invested in training in small offices like these.

It’s this kind of stagnancy that’s contributing to the malaise of mainstream media.

Were I somebody living on that patch, I’d be looking to organisations like Talk About Local and People’s Voice Media to help me set up some online competition to do the job properly.

If journalists aren’t trained or managed properly, the big media companies have only got themselves to blame if community micro-sites come in and fill a gap in the market.