What I Do

Old-timey photo of old-timey
Globe entrance
(photo by me!)

It's getting harder and harder to explain to people exactly what I do. Professionally speaking, anyway. I work for a newspaper, but these days newspapers aren't quite the simple operation they've always been, and besides, my employer had already found a way to make publishing just a newspaper pretty complicated long before it opened the can of worms of digital publishing.

There was a time I could simply say I was an editor, or that I designed pages. But after a few years with the company I managed to start using my derelict computer science skills to start contributing to the newsroom publishing system that we use - that's the software that reporters use to write their stories, designers use to build printed pages, and editors use to publish the website.

After another few years, my work on the system became less of a sideshow and more my main purpose in being there. In 2010, after 10 years with the company, I officially stopped having any hand in editing content or contributing to my company's actual products and transitioned into full time support for the computer system.

So what exactly does that mean?