Over 60, and Proud to Join the Digerati

IN the summer of 2008, just before I turned 61, I went to work at FLYP, an online digital publication that combines text with Flash animation, motion graphics and streaming audio and video to tell stories. It’s part of a larger effort to explore new forms of multimedia journalism.

FLYP’s founder, Alan Stoga, is several years younger than I am. The other people on the staff are decades younger than either of us. Most of them, I suspect, have body piercings or tattoos of some sort. You can say 60 is the new 40 all you want. Where I work, even 40 is pretty old.

I used to be the top editor of Time, Life and People magazines (back when print was king). On my first day at FLYP, I was introduced to the staff as someone who “has forgotten more about magazines than any of us has ever known.” This comported nicely with my self-image. I thought that by this time in my life, kids coming out of college would be lucky to work with me, pleased to learn from the experience that I’ve worked so hard (and proudly) to achieve.

It hasn’t turned out that way. The young digerati at FLYP are ambitious, smart, thoughtful and hard-working, and in fact, I feel lucky to be working with them.

Staff members have been very patient about helping me understand things like video codecs and MySQL databases. So much so that I learn more than I teach most days, which is both humbling and thrilling.

But here’s a paradox: I’m also a boss, and the age difference further emphasizes that distinction. More clearly now, life in the office resembles my fate as a parent at home, particularly as my children grow older: My job is to sustain, to provide and sometimes to teach, not necessarily to be a friend. I think I might be happier as a colleague, but age makes the phrase “collegial boss” ever more oxymoronic, like “cool parent” — there’s something suspicious about it.

Given this distance between us, I wasn’t sure what my employees thought of me until I started writing this column, and I finally decided to ask them.

Read more . . .

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Tags: 60 is the new 40, digerati, digital publication, elder in the digital world, multimedia journalism

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 29th, 2009 at 11:06 am and is filed under Communications, Consider This, Innovation in Society, NY Times, Worth Repeating. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.