A former regional daily journalist has written a book about the “radical” changes to newsrooms over the past two decades.

Mike Scialom’s ‘Press-Ganged: Journalism’s shaky start to the Digital Age’ offers a personal take on how practices have changed during a 20-year stint on the Cambridge News.

In the book, Mike, who served as motoring editor and business writer at the News, aims to describe a changing journalistic landscape which has seen the transition to a new technological era.

Mike, who said he had “a lot of fun” writing the book, now works for Iliffe Media as associate editor of its IQ business magazine.

He added: “Writing about the road the trade has gone down – or is being shunted down – was far easier than going through parts of it because the cuts that have taken place in the newspaper trade in the scramble to migrate online have been very severe.

“But worse than that is the general babble on the internet, which is in danger of re-engineering our most basic perceptions about the world.

“Until the Silicon Valley giants are obliged to pay their way in terms of tax and regulatory oversight, which includes compliance with the laws on data use and reuse, newspapers are being obliged to adapt to an era in which the primacy of their role is being challenged, with devastating consequences for many communities. Clearly, the right response now is to rise to the challenges and point up the dangerous waters the industry confronts.

“Fortunately, there is a bit of a happy ending in the sense that a new title was successfully launched in Cambridge in 2016, [Iliffe weekly] the Cambridge Independent, and that’s proving to be a breath of fresh air in an industry that appeared to be running out of steam.”

The book can be bought here.