IN the summer of 2008, just before I turned 61, I went to work at FLYP, an online digital publication that combines text with Flash animation, motion graphics and streaming audio and video to tell stories. It’s part of a larger effort to explore new forms of multimedia journalism.

FLYP’s founder, Alan Stoga, is several years younger than I am. The other people on the staff are decades younger than either of us. Most of them, I suspect, have body piercings or tattoos of some sort. You can say 60 is the new 40 all you want. Where I work, even 40 is pretty old.

I used to be the top editor of Time, Life and People magazines (back when print was king). On my first day at FLYP, I was introduced to the staff as someone who “has forgotten more about magazines than any of us has ever known.” This comported nicely with my self-image. I thought that by this time in my life, kids coming out of college would be lucky to work with me, pleased to learn from the experience that I’ve worked so hard (and proudly) to achieve.

It hasn’t turned out that way. The young digerati at FLYP are ambitious, smart, thoughtful and hard-working, and in fact, I feel lucky to be working with them.

Staff members have been very patient about helping me understand things like video codecs and MySQL databases. So much so that I learn more than I teach most days, which is both humbling and thrilling.

But here’s a paradox: I’m also a boss, and the age difference further emphasizes that distinction. More clearly now, life in the office resembles my fate as a parent at home, particularly as my children grow older: My job is to sustain, to provide and sometimes to teach, not necessarily to be a friend. I think I might be happier as a colleague, but age makes the phrase “collegial boss” ever more oxymoronic, like “cool parent” — there’s something suspicious about it.

“I don’t ever think about Jim’s age until someone in the office brings it up,” one employee said, “usually referencing one of his digital gaffes — like forgetting to push ‘play’on a YouTube video and then wondering why the video’s ‘broken.’ ” (Ouch!)

Another comment, a bit painful, too, but quite true: “We’re a small team where we can’t get hung up on who is guiding whom. New media isn’t about who has the longest résumé. It’s about who has the best ideas and who can implement them the most creatively. That’s something that age can’t really teach you.”

This was my favorite: “Seeing someone like Jim find what we’re doing exciting has made me see it in a new way, sort of like when I started out. His enthusiasm for it reminds me why I went this way.”

A fine young man. Going places, that boy.

But let’s be clear: My enthusiasm is not like theirs. One big difference between the FLYP staff and me is how strongly they react to things. At my age, the passion of youth looks a little tiring.

At times, when someone becomes anguished over an interview that didn’t pan out, or a favorite sentence that was cut, I want to put out a hand and say, “Hey, really, it’s going to be all right.” Other times, when a story goes well and one of them is feeling all manic and high-fivey, I want to say, “Hey, really, things aren’t as great as they look.”

In a way, the extremes of youthful emotion remind me of media commentary these days. Some pundits are in dark despair over the decline of reading and print, convinced that we’re becoming a nation of addled multitaskers who stare at screens all day. Another set seems to takes great delight in the slow, painful death of “dead-tree media.” To both sides, I want to say: Get over it!

n the digital world, though, social networks are now bigger than most national populations, more people are consuming more news and information than ever before, and an archive of all the world’s knowledge is being built and streamed to your favorite device. This new world brings with it as much promise as pain. It’s like youth that way.

MEDIA will change as radically as technology allows, and right now the Internet is moving over the media landscape like a tsunami. But the job I learned to love when young was to tell stories, and the story has lost nothing in this transition. It is as elemental and as riveting as ever.

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Everybody’s worried about the device. Could Microsoft’s Courier be the answer, or the iTablet? Good question, but not the most important one. It’s less the device than the devices — the crafts and the art of storytelling — that need updating most urgently for the digital world.

The young people I work with now will be the settlers of that frontier, and I can’t think of anything I would rather do than help them get there.

Over 60, and Proud to Join the Digerati

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