I’ve been in journalism for close to 30 years. As one would expect, my skills, the tools of the trade and the state of the industry itself have evolved dramatically over that time.

Newsrooms that once functioned under a cloud of cigarette smoke now work in a cloud computing environment. Writers who once tucked a reporter’s notebook in their back pocket now wield a digital voice recorder or a Flip camcorder. Editors who once redlined copy and haggled over how headlines matched the lead art now stress over Web analytics and keyword selection.

The Boston Herald has never been one to update just for the sake of updating. At the Herald (where I used to work) the general theory is, “If it’s good enough for Gutenberg, it’s good enough for us – and besides anything new would cost money.” So now the paper says it is “preparing” to move away from the Atex system it has been using for the last 27 years.

The Atlantic is looking to a new commenting system to help increase reader engagement on its newly redesigned website.

The Atlantic, a 150-plus-year-old magazine that publishes in print 10 times a year, covers culture, business and politics. The website redesign, launched earlier this week, is designed to better integrate magazine content, blogs, videos and other Web content around seven topic areas.

 The Columbia Journalism Review just released a report called "Magazines and Their Web Sites".  It's possible to draw a conclusion from the findings that magazine websites are more likely to be profitable if they put "web guys" in charge and don't worry much about things like copy editing or fact checking.  Well, you might think that if you confused correlation with causality.