The principles of old-fashioned journalism are still of undoubted public benefit - Bill Carmichael

In essence journalism is a simple, perhaps even mundane, trade - you find out things and you tell other people about them.

But there was something deeply magical about the old newspaper business. I can recall the visceral thrill as a young reporter when the whole building used to shake on its foundations as the mighty presses began to roll in the basement.

If you’ve never seen giant rolls of white newsprint transformed into a rapidly moving river of finished newspaper copies streaming off the press, you have missed a treat.

And knowing my name appeared at the top of some of those stories and would be read by tens of thousands of people made me positively glow with pride and pleasure.

As a cub reporter one of my jobs was to go down to the “machine room” to pick up the galley proofs of the births, marriages and deaths column to see if anyone locally prominent had experienced one of those great life events that could make the basis of a story.

It wasn’t as straightforward as it sounds. Newspapers back then were very heavily unionised and if I put so much as a toenail across the white lines painted around the linotype machines the entire printing staff would walk off the job and completely halt production.

Reflecting back on my career, I reckon the news industry has seen some of the most profound and rapid changes of any industry sector over the last 40 years.

For example, all those linotype operators are gone now. In a shockingly rapid few short years the development of computerised typesetting entirely replaced the old movable metal type method of production that had been the mainstay of the printing industry since the Gutenberg Bible rolled off the presses in 1455.

But an even bigger shock was to come with the information revolution heralded by the development of the internet, and then by the near ubiquity of the mobile phone.

When I was working as a news editor some years ago, I would at least skim read every national newspaper at the beginning of the shift, while listening to the radio bulletins and keeping an eye on the television screens showing 24-hour news above the news desk.

These days if I ask a lecture theatre of 130 journalism students if anyone has read a newspaper that morning, I would be lucky if a single hand goes up. Everything today is condensed into that little wonder of technology we call the mobile phone.

Of course there are many advantages to this, not least speed and convenience. But there is a danger too. The way the algorithms work is that they bombard you with stories and opinions similar to what you have read in the past, and there is a real risk that you fall into a “filter bubble” or “echo chamber” where you only encounter stories you agree with.

I am convinced that many young people rarely meet beliefs they disagree with, and as a result have lost the ability to effectively argue their case.

I am sure this has contributed to the increased polarisation of political discourse in the modern world, with both sides shouting past each other without ever really engaging. So, I think there is still an important role for what we might call “old fashioned” journalism and traditional newspapers, where you are likely to come across a spectrum of news and opinion.

Take for example the superlative coverage of the Sheffield tree felling scandal by Yorkshire Post reporter, Chris Burn.

In the face of determined obfuscation, and some outright lies, Chris showed a dogged tenacity to uncover the truth, which finally led this week to a grovelling apology from Sheffield City Council for its many failings.

The people of Sheffield would have never discovered the full depth of the scandal without Chris’s brilliant journalism.

Some things don’t change, and keeping the public informed with accurate, well-researched and impartial information, to enable people to make informed decisions about who governs them, is an undoubted public benefit.