Old Dogs New Tricks and Crappy Newspaper Executives

Digital First reporting:
John Paton: Good evening.
I’m old media.
This is my 36th year as a newspaper man – apologies – my 36th year as a multi-platform news executive.
It’s a career I started as a copyboy on this same street about a dozen blocks east of here.
I was hired for taking a picture of a belly dancer fooling with a drunk columnist. I was given the job of a guy who had just been fired for being a drunk. And I ended my first night on the job, taking home – dead drunk – the guy who hired me.
In my career the only reprimand I have ever received – if you don’t count the odd suspension for insubordination – was about expenses, specifically it was about booze. It read: “You are no longer allowed to order an Armagnac, digestif or any other after dinner drink that is older than you are.”
This is commonly referred to as the Golden Era of journalism.
And now, like many of you, I am struggling hard to teach this old dog new tricks.
Struggling to accept that much of what we know is no longer valid.
And trying to come to grips with the fact that crappy newspaper executives are a bigger threat to journalism’s future than any changes wrought by the Internet.
All of us have been subjected to the annual spectacle of a gaggle of print publishers gathering on a panel – Doug Knight, our moderator this evening, has officiated over a couple of these – to declaim they are not dead yet.
It’s an embarrassing display played out time and time again at conferences where our industry heads look like aging ingénues at Stratford declaring they can still play Juliette. And nobody has the heart to break it to them.
Or worse still, mediocre journalists, wrapping themselves in the flag of long-form journalism, to deride the value of social media as a reporting tool. A tool they don’t understand or care to understand.
http://jxpaton.wordpress.com/2012/02/18/old-dogs-new-tricks-and-crappy-newspaper-executives/