So — as my son starts every sentence — this is my last full week before officially retiring on June 30. I started my previous job as editor of Arkansas Business on Aug. 2, 1999, so I’m cutting out a few weeks shy of 27 years at this company. And I had been in the full-time workforce 17 years before I landed here.
Forty-four years feels like a long time, and even longer when I think about the changes that I have navigated. My first job after graduating from Harding University in 1982 was as a reporter for the Pine Bluff Commercial. At that time, lowly reporters like me were writing stories on IBM Selectric typewriters. I often took dictation over the WATS line (look it up) from our Little Rock bureau reporter because that was more efficient than the insanely slow cylinder-shaped transceiver that was a precursor to the fax machine.
Almost every year, it seems like I’ve faced some new technological advance. Dumb terminals with no brain, just a keyboard and screen connected to the mainframe computer. Internal email. Fax machines. Personal computers. Online bulletin boards, America Online, the World Wide Web, Google. In 1995, during a hiatus from the news business after the birth of my second son, my boss at the Nashville (Tennessee) Bar Association asked me to get us one of those websites. After I figured out what he was talking about, I figured out how to create one.
When I arrived at Arkansas Business four years later, I had never used the Internet — it was then considered a proper noun — for reporting, while some of the youngest reporters didn’t seem to know how to get information if it wasn’t on a company’s rudimentary website. Our photographs were still being shot on film, color ink was only available on designated pages, the pages were literally being pasted on heavy blue-lined paper and physically carried to the printer.
We started weekday delivery of news by email at the end of 2000, although I couldn’t imagine why anyone would need to read local news on their computer. Ever more public information online made reporting easier and more robust, but hasn’t replaced the need for human sources and in-person interviews. I was so grateful that we had converted to cloud-based Google Docs long before the pandemic we navigated in 2020.
And now our newsroom is discovering ways that AI can improve our product and productivity without replacing the human element that brings curiosity, critical thought and precise storytelling to Arkansas Business. I’m actually glad I’m not the one having to figure that out.
We boomers may sometimes seem change-averse, but maybe it’s just because we are worn out from all the changes we have already made.
This article originally appeared in our sister publication, Arkansas Business. Gwen Moritz is signing off as a contributing editor at Arkansas Business Publishing Group.
