Gather round, kids! The old newspaperman is going to tell you about the bad ol’ days way, way back in time. About 15, 20 years ago. Ancient history, that is.

Back when Serious Editors thought this internet thing was never going to amount to much.

Back when editors had to carefully consider what story he/she chose — for one very good and obvious reason:

It might not have art.

Yes. This really happened. All the time.

We did not publish stories — or didn’t run much of them, or held them for days — because we knew we didn’t have a photo immediately at hand to run with those stories.

Now? We are absolutely cavalier about choosing stories and assuming the photo department can find art.

Example: The other day I did a list of five weird final scores in English soccer. We wrote blurbs on each of the five — and each was to be illustrated with a mugshot of someone who played in the game.

One of those games was a 6-6 result involving Arsenal and Leicester City in 1930, and the star of the game was an Arsenal player named Dave Halliday. And I didn’t give one second of thought to what had been my “standard editor setting” of a couple decades ago, which would have been: “How in the world will we find a mug of a semi-prominent soccer player from a game 80 years ago?”

This list included games from the 1970s and 1980s … and mugs for those games were coughed up right away. Of course.

Turns out, Dave Halliday from 1930 was a little difficult, but not impossible, like it would have been a generation ago. The photo editor came down, said, “Hmmm, don’t know about that guy from 1930,” went back to his desk, and 15 minutes later he had a photo.

This is huge. A major change for the better.

We older editors in print journalism spent most of our careers doing the daily calculus of … “if I run this story, can I illustrate it?” It was one of the first things you thought of. You had to. Or you had big holes on your pages.

My first decade in journalism, we made a practice of filing AP sports photos (these were the actual glossy/floppy black-and-whites churned out by the newsroom photo machine) in three enormous filing cabinets. Clerks with a little time on their hands were dispatched to sort a stack of saved photos (and to file them, alphabetically) that showed most of the face of some rookie pitcher with the Cleveland Indians — just in case we needed it for a feature somewhere down the line.

We also spent money to buy things like mugs of every player in Major League Baseball, and were actually excited when they showed up. About five pounds of them on heavy stock.

Now? Ha! Everything is accessible electronically. Everything. (Or almost.) We probably could get a feature photo of you, looking pensive, by the end of the day.

This is a huge change in how editors approach newspapering. We no longer worry about whether a photo can be found. We assume it can be. We know it can be. Now and then it might cost us a few bucks.

Only on those rare occasions, when the photo guys come over and say, “Can’t find that anywhere, unless we’re willing to pay $300 for it” … do I find myself thinking, “Wow. Modern technology. We just assume …”

I don’t even think about photos anymore when I plug a story into the section. And it rarely comes back to bite me.

Wasn’t like that, children, Back Then.