What would Mike Neasom have made of the 2015 journalist?

THE News Centre in Portsmouth would not win any architectural awards for beauty. It's a concrete edifice right next to the bus station in Hilsea on the northern edge of Portsea island and which has been home for 43 years for the city's newspaper, The News.
Next month, the paper is due to move to a new home in Northarbour, plush new offices at another out-of-town site near IBM.
The move was inevitable. When I visited the offices yesterday for a meeting, it was like a ghost building with staff rattling around half-fillled newsrooms, and walking past darkened rooms now shut up for good.
When I last worked at The News as sports editor some 13 years ago, the place was humming, teaming with people. But as technology has moved on, economies of scale found and the recession has bitten the newspaper industry harder than most on the butt, so staff numbers have drastically dwindled.
The no-nonsense compositors have gone, the print room is run by just a handful of people, and the number of journalists has declined too. You could have heard a pin drop when I walked through the newsroom yesterday afternoon.
Some of the editorial guys I used to work with back in the 90s are still there; Mark Acheson, Simon Toft, Chris Owen, Malcolm Wells, and good old Eric, the chatty inputter with his famed cardigans and chamois leather!
They were great days of a razor-sharp six editions a day evening paper under the much-respected editor, Geoff Elliott; early, Fareham, Gosport, Waterlooville, Havant and a city final. For the sports guys, we also had the small matter of the Sports Mail to produce every Saturday afternoon and for one year we even tried to publish a Midweek Mail.
In the mid-90s, The News was one of the first regional newspapers to push forward a website closely allied to the newspaper - it was controversial at the time with plenty of teething problems, but the sheer professionalism of the journalists embraced the new media.
What a team we had then. journalists who were right at the top of their game. Even the trainees had to be on the button from the off. There could be no passengers in the newsroom, and there was no expectation among the new recruits of writing a front page splash in their first week - they would have to bide their time to suffer the slings and arrows from the hard as nails news editors.
Our sports team alone was a formidable bunch headed by the Pompey legend Mike Neasom, a total workaholic who didn't suffer fools gladly but was the best sportswriter I have ever worked with.
When I joined the sports desk as a sports writer back in 1991 we had Colin Channon as sports editor, Calvin Shulman deputy editor, alongside the top desk of seniors consisting of Mike Neasom, rugby/golf writer Alister Marshall and horse racing expert, Mike Allen. Simon Parker and Danny Griffiths completed one of the strongest sports teams I have known.
What set all these guys apart is that they could write, not just the big stories in mainstream sports, but across a plethora of pastimes. They all knew their sports, had unrivalled contacts books, they could interview to get the most out of their subject, they would work a story right to the end, and their prose was a joy to read - and easy to sub (well, except "fat boy waffles on about Bognor" Danny, maybe!).
It's a mark of how much esteem Mike was held within the sports world, that when he died in 2004 at the age of 69, tributes poured in far and wide from across the sporting world. He was held with enormous respect by the likes of Jim Smith, Alan Ball, Lawrie McMenemy and Robin Smith.
We live in a far different newsroom in 2013. The demands and pressures are much greater now as journalists are expected to be multi-disciplined across an ever-changing media.
At Johnston Press, now the owners of The News, the talk is of the 2015 journalist capable of writing for paper, on-line, to shoot and edit video, while using Twitter and Facebook effectively during a breaking story as well as having a sustainable presence on both platforms - which includes blogging!
It's a great time to be a journalist, far different from the halcyon days of Neasom, but exciting nonetheless.
I'm unsure how Mike would have fared with Twitter and Facebook, or even the increasing demands of in-paper and the website - no doubt a few expletives would have been uttered - and as for video, don't even go there!