So, I went to Cork for a journalism conference last Thursday.

You might reasonably wonder what I know about journalism. Not much, in truth: my background is in music radio.

But my first week in commercial radio was spent in the newsroom.

As is now a source of fascination for some people, incredibly my first job on my first day was holding the mobile phone for one of our reporters, Maria Duarte. You might wonder whether it was very lazy of her not to carry her own mobile phone: but this was back in 1989, when mobile phones were the size of a small flight bag and incredibly heavy - it was like carrying a car battery around. I had to carry it for her as she went to report on a house fire in Bradford - light damage, but smelly. Nobody died, but the station still sent out a reporter to file a piece from the incident, and then to interview a fireman on a Uher tape machine. This piece of audio was driven back to the station, edited on tape using something quite like sticky-tape and some chinagraph pens, transferred to an eight-track cartridge, and played out on the next hour’s news bulletin.

I suppose you’d marvel at the staffing levels of the newsroom if you compared it to a typical newsroom now. During the day, there was a news editor, at least four other journalists, a sports editor, a sports reporter, and a slightly nervous thin looking kid who occasionally helped to carry mobile phones. That’s a news team of around eight in total; in fact, I think it might have been even larger.

That team was creating news for, essentially, one radio station: Classic Gold. News bulletins were five minutes an hour; ten minutes at 1pm. Pennine FM took the first three minutes of every bulletin, with a clunky-sounding timecheck to allow them to opt-out. And that was it: no web, no text message alerts, no production for different stations. Occasionally, the team got a story accepted by IRN, and it was sent around the country. News cues were written on typewriters, on little pieces of A5 thin paper. Audio was on cartridge. If you were really unfortunate, you dropped them on the way in to the studio.

And you try and tell people that these days.

One of the things I wished I’d said at the conference was to tell the students to make sure that they can do more than just write. If they can’t take photos, edit videos, record decent audio, and write, then they’ll be useless in the emerging journalistic world.

Hopefully, when I speak in a panel on Wednesday night in Dublin (on the same subject - what are the odds of that?!), I’ll remember to say it.

Photo: Steve Rhodes. Used under licence.