When I started off in journalism more than two decades ago the rattle of typewriters was still reverberating in my ears.

Reporters still went to the pub at lunchtime and many of them after work too.

Mobile phones had not been invented, if indeed anyone had thought of creating them, and the news (apart from TV and radio) came only on printed paper and was delivered by a newspaper boy or girl in the mornings and evenings.

And builder and plumber types used to read their Sun and Mirrors in white vans complete with cups of coffee and bacon butties.

Although there was change as newspapers brought in steadily more sophisticated computers it was all fairly relaxed at least in the regional world. Life went on pretty much as it had always done.

But over the last few years the change has been dramatic.

Social media such as Facebook and Twitter have changed newsgathering procedures in ways barely conceivable before and now there are LiveBlogs, which update the news every few minutes.

As an old-fashioned, conservative sort I never dreamt I would cancel my newspaper subscription and those enjoyable mornings of toast, tea and the Telegraph – but I have.

Nowadays I not only write four and sometimes five days a week for the LiveBlog but access my news on my smartphone in bed of a night.

Everything is one short click away.

What will happen in the future is hard to tell.

The Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger has said in the past that he would be “relaxed” if his print edition ceased to exist and became web-based only.

As circulation figures inexorably fall that may well happen in the not too distant future.

At this point I wonder what an old editor friend of mine would have made of it all.

He had an, even for those unenlightened times, a peculiar style to compiling his monthly magazine.

Every morning he would bring his briefcase into the office filled with his page proofs, a tube of sticky and a fair-sized thirst.

He would pour it all out on to the desk and start doing a bit of ‘sticking and pasting’.

He would anxiously inspect the office clock every few minutes and when it got close to 10.30am he would start asking his colleagues: “So, where is it today, then?”

We all used to enjoy this moment as the answer was always the same - some town centre hostelry or other.

Excuses would be made as to why we couldn’t join him so early and later on we would find him having fun with several of his cronies.

Around 3pm or so he would return to the office and after a bit more sticking and pasting he would empty the whole lot back into his briefcase before resuming his nocturnal adventures in Leeds.

Inevitably the magazine was not always impeccably produced as the bits of sticking and pasting did not match up.

It couldn’t last and he was finally shown the door one day but, by Jove, it was enormous fun.