Rocking chair or reinvention? Can you teach an old dog a new trick?

I run into people every day who tell me they love the printed page. Something about routine, morning coffee and the feel of paper in the hands.

I get it. I am an ink-in-my-veins, three generation, print journalist. My grandfather and my father ran a community newspaper in north Idaho.

Counting college and internships I have worked for six different newspapers during my career.

Unfortunately for the business, those readers are mostly my age.

People are consuming more of their information online, on their phones and I am told, in video form.

And the goalposts keep moving at a dizzying pace.

I am from the 1900s. When I acquired my first video camera it was in the old 4×3, box-like, aspect ratio and recorded the clips to magnetic tape.

While I was still figuring out how to use a computer to edit the pieces onto something, the aspect ratio changed to 16×9 high definition.

Now vertical video is the thing. Does form follow function or is it the other way around?

A smartphone is shaped like a bar of soap and just as slippery. Holding one is hard enough without rotating back and forth to view a video.

But I must point out that this beautiful world we live in presents itself in landscape mode. Vertical video is like looking through a tube.

Every time I see someone photographing a group picture in portrait mode I must resist the compulsion to snatch the camera from their hand.

Humans are binocular creatures for an evolutionary reason. At the very least the adaptation allowed our ancestors to see a predator coming in their peripheral vision. Alas, I scream to the void.

But, a good story is a good story regardless of how it is delivered.

Common sense tells me adapt or perish.

So instead of retiring to my rocking chair to reminisce about the “good ol’ days,” I have chosen to reinvent myself as a multimedia vertical video content creator.

You have been warned.