The news business is constantly changing and that means changing with the times. So, reluctantly, I have started a news TikTok.

I’m not a fan of TikTok. I don’t like how the app is designed or how it’s meant to keep a user swiping for minutes and sometimes hours. I don’t like its connection to the Communist Chinese government and how it constantly scrapes information and data.

The problem is that is where the young’uns are, and if you want the teens and young adults to read your news stories, you have to be where they are. And TikTok is where they are.

I don’t know when I became such a technological old man, reluctant to try new things. Is this what getting older is? I’m only 43, though I have joked for years that my soul is 75.

I didn’t always used to be this way. I’ve said this before, but I feel confident I was one of this state’s first bloggers. I had a Gmail account back when it was invite only. I had a Facebook before it was opened up for the public. I was an early adopter of Twitter, now known as X.

I went through extensive training 16 years ago on being a backpack journalist. I was live-streaming press conferences long before that became the norm. I know what it is like to have a news story or a YouTube video go viral and get hundreds of thousands of clicks and page views.

I also come from the Xennial generation, bridging Generation X and Millennials. Thanks to former governor Gaston Caperton, I had access to computers in my elementary school in the late 1980s. I’m old enough to have blown the dust off of a giant floppy disk. The first time I used a CD-ROM in middle school, I accidentally put the disk in the giant floppy slot.

That’s right, I’m old enough to have used a computer that had both a CD-ROM and giant floppy disk drive. My generation was probably the first generation to be able to easily transition into this highly online world we now reside in. I watched as we transitioned to saving files on 3.5 inch diskettes, burnt CD-ROMs, USB sticks, SD cards, external hard drives, and now the cloud.

And at this point in my news career, I’ve used every medium there is: newspaper, radio, TV, the web, social media, podcasting, etc. So, I guess I will also use TikTok now until, ultimately, TikTok is supplanted by the next big thing.

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Last week, I attended a memorial for John Law, a giant in state government communications and lobbying.

John was a fellow news reporter, having started his career at the Fayette Tribune in his home county. But he eventually made it to Charleston, where he worked his way up to the communications director for the formerly named West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources.

That’s how I first knew John. When I arrived in Charleston in 2010 as a reporter for West Virginia Watchdog, a project of the now-defunct Public Policy Foundation of West Virginia, it took me a while to be trusted by lawmakers and Capitol-dwellers who were unfamiliar with me and my reporting. John was one of the first people to treat me with respect and answer my questions for stories.

Since his time at DHHR, Law has worked for the West Virginia Nurses Association, the Kanawha-Charleston Health Department, and the West Virginia Medical Association. John passed away on July 7 at age 68. I was very pleased to see him one last time a few weeks prior at a social event in Charleston, where he jokingly told me I need to hire an agent based on how much I keep getting booked on WV MetroNews shows.

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Last week also saw the death of Eyewitness News investigative reporter Kennie Bass at age 62 after a fight with cancer.

I’ve also known Kennie as long as I’ve lived in Charleston, though I probably bumped into him more in recent years during my time as the state government reporter for Ogden Newspapers. Kennie is a member of the state Broadcasting Hall of Fame and had recently begun work in the Charleston field office for U.S. Sen. Jim Justice following retirement from WCHS-TV

I’ll confess that while we could get along pretty well, we would also sometimes butt heads. There is no doubt that Kennie was an aggressive and dogged reporter with a huge personality. And we in the journalism profession can get kind of catty sometimes. I seem to recall both of us getting into an argument after the last in-person COVID-19 briefing in the lobby of Building 3 in March 2020, though for the life of me I can’t remember why.

But let there be no doubt that Kennie was an excellent reporter. It was his reporting early on about an overpriced couch in a former state Supreme Court justice’s office that led to federal charges against two justices (one pleaded guilty and the other was convicted), the resignation of another justice, and the impeachment of all the justices on the bench back in 2018.

Those initial news reports by Kennie ultimately led to a number of reforms at the state Supreme Court and a nearly new slate of justices. That’s the kind of accountability reporting that we journalists dream of doing. Kennie’s reputation as a news man and his support of local community theater will continue to live on. Godspeed.

(Adams is the state government reporter for Ogden Newspapers. He can be contacted at sadams@newsandsentinel.com)