As anyone who's been reading any newspapers at all over the past month will be painfully aware, from the endless space-filling reviews of the year and lists of the decade, it's 2010 tomorrow. And while FleetStreetBlues won't be doing its own retrospective - to be honest, when the Millenium struck, some of us were still in school - it's worth mentioning a few older and wiser hacks' attempts to sum up ten years of epic change in journalism.
So, in no particular order... POLIS Director Charlie Beckett believes the big lesson, now learnt, is that digital cannot be 'put back in the bottle' - but investment is key. Phil Clark, digital director for UBM Built Environment (now there's a title that couldn't have existed ten years ago), remembers covering the aftermath of the World Trade Centre attack for Building magazine - and is likewise struck by the transformative change in technology. 'I wasn't quite bashing out copy on a typewriter ten years back but it almost feels like that.'
Marc Reeves, until recently editor at the Birmingham Post, takes an even longer view, reflecting on why tomorrow will be the first New Year's Day for 25 years when he's not employed as a journalist.
And Craig Lewis, deputy editor at the Milton Keynes Citizen, has a dead-on, if depressing, journalistic Christmas Carol ('Bob Hackitt trawls through PR pomposity and pastes it onto ill-constructed websites, wishing to persuade the 'reader' to pay £1.50 to learn about how the council has put up new toilets').
There are more, lots more, but somehow that seems an appropriate note on which to say farewell to 2009. Happy New Year everyone. Let's hope 2010's a little better.
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