Any 'Mad Men' fans out there? It's my favorite television show.

Cast of Mad Men, from amctv.com

It's about an advertising agency in the 1960s. I'm not in advertising, but I'm in journalism which deals immensely with advertising.

The setting of the show is entrancing. The men are the top dogs, except for the one woman who managed to squeeze in. All the other women are secretaries who use typewriters and organize the lives of their male specimen bosses.

The men sneak around, cheat on their spouses, divorce is incredibly frowned upon as is remarriage after a divorce ... it's a totally different world, or is it?

I'll stay off the morals part of it for now.

Every time I watch it (which is almost every night, since I have all the of the episodes on DVD) I think about my profession and what it would have been like to be a journalist in that time. Reporters interview the characters on the show often, most of the time they're calling from payphones and smoking a cigarette.

It must have been so different. I have a desk, a computer monitor, a laptop, wireless internet, a cell phone, a video camera, a digital camera, Google maps and other devices that make reporting much different than it was then.

But then again, the expectations have changed. Being on the front page of the paper doesn't mean the same as it used to. That used to be a sign of success, a triumphant excitement. It meant that you were the best for that issue of the paper. It still means that to an extent, but with the digital movement, it's not the same.

Having the most "hits" or "online readers" or "likes on Facebook" now mean success. I'm young. I'm from this era of the online world, but I still don't always like it. As a kid when I thought about being a journalist, I thought about being on the front page. I thought about seeing that byline above the fold.

When I first started, I still looked forward to that front-page story. And I still do, but not like I did before. Some front-page stories in the paper are also the most-read stories on our website, but not always. A lot of times a short, afternoon update about a funny police story beats out all other stories.

I remember one time a few months back, when Karl Ziomek was still my boss and Paige Houpt was still our intern, hearing about how pages used to be designed for The News-Herald. Karl told Paige and I about cutting out pieces of paper to post them on a larger sheet. We discussed the transformation in technology and such. As Paige and I complained about having Hewlett-Packard netbooks instead of Macbooks, we learned how lucky we were.

Digital is the new route. Advertising is digital now. Journalism is digital now. Readers read digitally. "It is what it is," as my former boss would say.

Some morning when I get to work, I think about the last episode of 'Mad Men' I watched and how the scenes compared. Sometimes I want to trade places with one of the characters for a week to see what it really felt like to have the front page story, above the fold. To make a call from a payphone. To rely on shorthand. It would be a riot, I'm sure.

Despite the changes, journalism is still journalism. We still make the calls, we still do the interviews, we still get yelled at, we still get praised, we still are the source for news. No matter how we do it, we get it done.

"Any work of art that can be understood is the product of journalism," - Christiane Amanpour