The year I became a newspaper reporter, an internet-connected computer — one — was installed in the newsroom, shaping the change the course of my career and my industry. I’m up for a bar debate over this, but I doubt any industry has been as transformed by the internet as as much as the news business.

Of course the internet has reshaped all of society, which is why I’m in this class. I’m looking to get a better idea of how technology shapes our lives and how we can make smarter decisions about how we introduce and use technology into our lives.

As long as I’ve been a journalist, the news business has been behind technologically. We’ve been at the mercy of companies that knew what they were doing and had a much better idea of how things would end up than we did.

So news companies installed crappy content-management systems that limited what they could do and cost a fortune. They allowed anonymous, hateful comments to be posted on their sites without thinking through how that affected discourse. They created intrusive advertising to get between their journalism and their audience, and they installed ad tech to track their audience as they roamed the web. In so many ways, the news business has implemented technology in a way that demeans our journalism and disrespects our audience, eroding the trust that should be at the core of this relationship.

That’s how legacy news (mostly newspapers) has done it. Others have figured out how to use technology to strengthen their relationship with their audience. They’re working on ways to bring people into their reporting. They use data and news applications to tell stories that couldn’t be told with words. Many of these initiatives show promise. But they require doing things in a different way, and change is hard, especially when you need to create a product every day with fewer people and less revenue.