Monday, April 28, 2014

Former PMO spokesman bemoans the days before the Internet

In a POV piece on the CBC web page, former PMO spokesman Andrew MacDougall writes:

"In my old life as director of communications to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, I would often quip that I would love to have had my job in the days before smartphones and the internet. With 700 to 800 emails and dozens of calls a day, the life of a modern political communicator is full-on, to say the least.
"What must it have been like in the leisurely age of teletype, radio, the nightly broadcast and the next day's paper? No wonder hacks and flacks would get drunk together in the afternoon — they didn't have to worry about Twitter, Facebook, some crank's blog or filling up their website with reams of copy. And if people were behaving badly at the bar, or dipping their pens into each other's company ink, no one had access to the instant canvas of the internet to gossip about it.
"In the pre-digital era, the days had a rhythm and the news had a cycle. Reporters had one broadcast or a set number of column inches. There were one or two wire services, and they — and only they — had the responsibility of banging out a quick blast on the latest news.
The full story on the CBC web page

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