What do you want to be?

When peo­ple ask me what I do, I find it hard to come up with a one-word an­swer. Jour­nal­ist? Ed­i­tor? Trans­la­tor? None of these terms fully de­scribe my du­ties at Cat­alo­nia Today, al­though a lit­tle bit of each is part of the job. I usu­ally set­tle for “I work for a mag­a­zine”, which doesn't nec­es­sar­ily help much, as even the guy who fixes the pho­to­copier can say that.

Per­haps nowa­days I should say I work for a con­tent provider. As we make the trans­for­ma­tion to dig­i­tal, even a fairly con­ven­tional mag­a­zine like this one is em­brac­ing the brave new world. What with a web­site, on­line video, a pod­cast and, who knows, maybe even an app soon, as with most of the media Cat­alo­nia Today can­not af­ford to stand still.

In fact, the rate of change is so rapid that it is an ef­fort to keep up. New pro­fes­sional pro­files (jobs?) are spring­ing up and with ever more spe­cial­i­sa­tion it is a lit­tle be­wil­der­ing at times to nav­i­gate the in­creas­ingly ex­ten­sive range of dig­i­tal pro­fes­sions. It makes me think of the chil­dren's pro­grammes I used to watch, like Trump­ton or Post­man Pat, which pre­sented idyl­lic com­mu­ni­ties in which every­one had a fa­mil­iar role. The baker, the fire­man, the teacher, the builder, any child whether in the 1950s or the 1980s would be able to fol­low an episode of one of those clas­sics. But now? “Here comes Jim, the So­cial CRM Man­ager” or “Sally is a SEO & SEM Spe­cial­ist. Hello Sally” don't have the same charm.

In this issue we have a re­port on some of the new jobs that have ap­peared in re­cent years, and which are now much in de­mand by all com­pa­nies as dig­i­tal be­comes the norm. A widely quoted sta­tis­tic I've seen on the In­ter­net is that 65% of kids today will end up doing jobs that don't exist yet! It makes the typ­i­cal ques­tion we ask chil­dren we meet for the first time –“What do you want to be when you grow up?”– a bit un­fair to say the least.

In any case, this is the new re­al­ity and we have no choice but to get on board and get­ting our heads around liv­ing a dig­i­tal ex­is­tence. A good place to start is the afore­men­tioned ar­ti­cle on pages 48 and 49.

At the same time, it makes busi­ness ar­ti­cles more bear­able. Rather than just head-scratch­ing gob­bledy­gook about bonds and asset backed se­cu­ri­ties, today's busi­ness jour­nal­ism in­cludes fas­ci­nat­ing pro­files of in­no­v­a­tive apps, clever de­vices and start-up suc­cess sto­ries. I now enjoy the busi­ness pages much more, and it is per­haps some­thing we can do more on in this mag­a­zine . Drop us a line and let us know what you think.