When people talk to me and find out that I’m the Editor of the Cambrian News and Tenby Observer, they seem to develop the annoying knack of telling me how to do my job.

I don’t tell them how to fix an engine, plaster a wall or sell insurance. I know little about cylinder head gaskets, screeding mixes or how no claims bonuses work. But people seem to know everything about the newspaper business. And then they proceed to tell me how to do my job running the paper.

Then they’ll likely tell me they never buy it - but they sure as heck know what’s in it and have an opinion on it.

I am not a patient person, and I don’t suffer fools gladly. But I do know a thing or two about newspapers, the media business, and what can and can’t be done.

Legally.

Ethically.

Logistically.

Don’t confuse Cambrian News and Tenby Observer with social media.

When something appears in print under these titles or on social media platforms, I am legally and professionally bound to ensure that it is accurate, sound, and right.

You?

On social media you can post what you please and comment as you like – as long as it falls within the very loose and very unmonitored guidelines of those platforms. Heck, you just have to look at news events happening across the UK to see the effects of loose information on social media, posted and retweeted without a second thought, to see the effects it has.

If you choose to comment on one of the stories responsibly published by me or my team on social media, you are free to do so. I am not responsible for your comments there – the social media provider is.

So why am I telling you this?

The media landscape is changing. It always has. It always will.

I started off pecking out stories on a typewriter. New technology four decades ago was a fax. If you don’t know what that is, you don’t need to ask…

Technologies evolve, so too the means of delivering and publishing content. From that typewriter and reverse-charge phone calls – if you don’t know what they are, don’t ask either - and dictating copy over the phone back to a newspaper office, to filing stories and pictures from a laptop via satphone from the Libyan desert, things change.

At the end of March I was in Brittany on a sort of work thing when I was told that I had to be on a can’t-miss group call early the next morning. Sure enough came word that Tindle Newspapers, the long-time owner of the Cambrian News, Tenby Observer and about 30 other titles across Wales and the south of England, had been sold to Iliffe Media.

You, as readers, will hopefully have seen no change in our news stories or outlook since then. We’re still as fiercely independent as ever, taking on anyone regardless of authority.

We report the news without fear or favour. And continue to do so.

No. No one from above tells us what or what not to report. That’s just the way me and my news team like it.

The difference between Iliffe Media and Tindle Newspapers is that our new owners have evolved and prospered in the multimedia landscape.

Huh?

Let me put it simply.

By the autumn, you will no longer be able to read most of our content on Facebook or other social media platforms for free.

We will be introducing an online subscription model, hopefully by the end of September. That means if you want to read responsible and verified news from us, you will have to pay.

Sorry, but responsible news gathering and reporting comes at a price.

You can subscribe to read us online, just as you do with most other news sources. Or you can buy our newspapers at the newsagents.

In the coming few months over the summer, we will be posting less and less of our content on social media platforms. Sure, there will continue to be an element free online. But not much.

We are still working on exactly how much you’ll have to pay to read us online, for what content, and what we will give away for free.

But that’s the reality all news organisations that want to survive and thrive must live with.

So, come October when that mechanic, plasterer or insurance salesman tells me how to run a newspaper, maybe I will a bit more patient. Maybe.

Because then they will have had to buy it in print or online to know what they’re talking about. As if they did anyway.