Last month I wrote about how a longtime newspaper gig went the way of many newspapers:  poof!

Since then, Seattle's second biggest daily, the Post-Intelligencer, morphed into a web-only publication, trimming the writing staff from 160+ to 20-something folks "doing it all."  I was sitting in a press reception at a local theater and heard a longtime P-I reporter bemoan the fact that he just wasn't ready to switch into a new mode and would be retiring. 

I remembered the same writer once calling me and asking me to stop e-mailing attachments formatted to legal paper (a peculiarity of the arts organization where I worked).   The reason: he couldn't figure out how to change document size in Word or how to print out anything that wasn't letter-size.  The same reporter also used to ask that releases be faxed to him until his editor insisted that he learn to edit off e-mail.  So it is not surprising that as the news world changes, he's moving into retirement.  It's too bad that he couldn't bring himself to adapt, because his writing was always excellent and I'll miss his contributions to arts reporting around town.

This month, I switched from the traditional system of writing up my articles in Word and e-mailing them into an editor to be laid out and published on paper to being my own editor at the Examiner.com.  Like the P-I's new format, the Examiner.com asks its writers to supply the visuals as well as the words.  Luckily, working in the arts, that's fairly easy:  everyone makes pictures of their shows available.

But the tools are a bit different -- just as Red Room's are not the same as Blogger -- and it's been a learning curve over the last couple of weeks to get all the pieces to come together. This morning, I finally created an article with photos, video, and a slideshow. A bit of overkill maybe, but fun. 

I do miss having an editor. I think editors make writing sharper, cleaner, and help me discover better ways to write. But I'm glad to have a venue to continue arts reporting.  And, unlike the P-I, the Examiner.com does pay its bloggers (not much more than a cup of coffee at a cheap diner, but it's something).

So here I go, off into the 21st century and a new type of reporting, because I'm definitely not ready to retire from writing.