A completely meaningless factoid: Research indicates I appear to be the second-oldest Helias High School graduate on Facebook. That surprises me — I know several grads in my class who work in the computer industry, and I’m surprised they haven’t adapted.

I bring that up, in part, because of this column on the Editor & Publisher website. I think I work for one of the more open-minded newspaper newsrooms — and it’s almost certainly the most progressive of the big-newspaper newsrooms, some of which don’t let the online people work in the same building. Still, I’ve certainly heard some of the echoes that are raised in this column.

People love what they love. You can’t make someone who dislikes online media suddenly fall in love with it. There are plenty of people in many newspaper newsrooms who openly and aggressively dislike the changes the online medium has forced on the product they love. And the idea of starting up a blog, a Facebook page, or even learning the basics of how to use a computer is anathema to some genuinely serious, thoughtful, generally non-crotchety journalists.

But here’s the problem: If you’re not willing to change, you’re quickly becoming this generation’s lineotype operator or composing room paste-up artist. Those venerated jobs no longer exist at newspapers. Neither will yours.

The job you love is going away. You can mourn, you can curse the sky, but you are not going to change that. If you don’t want to change, you need to find something else to do that engages your passion. But if you drag your feet and drag and drag and drag, I strongly believe you will only further harm the thing you love.

That’s just where we are now. So if you’re in the business, it’s time for you to sign up for that Facebook page — and perhaps write a blog.