I am absolutely slammed this week with work, so I don’t have time to publish a blog every working day, as I usually do (though I do have time to Tweet).

But this is too good just to Tweet: a group of college journalists have published an issue of their campus newspaper without using any digital technology. Hilarity ensued.

I never had to use a typewriter in a newsroom, but I did have to use hot waxers, typesetting machines, exacto-knives and dark rooms (and I still have a couple of t-shirts with stains from photo development chemicals to prove it).

Are those skills wasted? Not at all. In fact, I now proudly note my pre-digital experience on my CV, because when I didn’t do so, I was told the reason I didn’t get a communications specialist job in East Timor a few years ago – which I very much wanted – was because the UNICEF staff person doing the hiring felt that I wouldn’t know how to do my job without the latest and greatest digital tools.

But this comment really got to me in this article about the college students using primitive news room technology:

Regardless of the stress or the obscene amount of paper that’s accumulated on the newsroom floor, I won’t forget what this project has given us. We’ve formed this sort of newsroom camaraderie that I hadn’t experienced before, and it means everything.

No question: we’re losing that kind of camaraderie of the work place. Everyone is work shifting (the term telecommuting is so passé), doing their work from home, from a coffee shop – anywhere but next to a co-worker. And that’s a loss. That’s not an improvement.