I’ve spent more than half my career in the media subbing on local, regional and national papers. As a writer and and editor, I was saved by subs on countless occasions. My blog posts are probably littered with literals and factual editors and, I’m sure, could do with a good going over by a decent sub.

But if I was a reporter now and an old hand sidled up to me and suggested that I might like to retrain as a sub, I’d run a mile. And as for joining one of the nationals’ subbing schemes for graduate trainees … fugeddaboutit.

We all know that this job is approaching the end of its natural life and, on some papers, is already life expired. I’m truly sorry if you’re a young guy, recently arrived in Fleet Street for your first downtable subbing job with your whole career stretching in front of you. Wrong place, wrong time …

Subs editors at work on The Oklahoman in 1953

So what to do? What follows is a not so much a survival guide, more a migration guide to encourage you to move as fast as possible to save your career in journalism. You see, what you don’t probably realise among all the arguments about working arrangements, hours, rotas, salaries and all the rest of that irrelevant crap is that, in many cases, subs will start disappearing on national papers next year. Yes - next year. I am being serious.

If this downturn turns into a slump - which many media groups now expect to extend across both print and online - the first ones out of the door will be the souls in print production. We’ll just get the guys on the newsdesk to do the job as part of a post moderation exercise on web copy with a few technological aids. A lot of you will think that that is not possible, that we won’t be able to do it. That the papers will be littered with howlers and literals. Well, you’re wrong. It can be done and it’s already proven.

What will accelerate this process will be the slump in online ad revenue - more content will be demanded. Reporters - already working flat out from first thing in the morning till late evening - won’t be able to do any more so we’ll have to hire some others. And how will we pay for them? You guessed it.

So please accept it and do something about it. Forget the Naional Union of Journalists - it won’t save you, its pathetic attempts to slow down the online publishing process are merely serving to accelerate the elimination of subs. Take this advice in the spirit in which it is intended.

1. Accept that your job is not a long-term or even a medium-term proposition. You’ll find that acceptance of reality is an enormously liberating thing. If you’re within seven years of retirement, have or are very close to paying off your mortgage, don’t have kids going through further education and they offer you redundancy, take it.
2. Stop fighting about working arrangements and get on with it. If you’re asked to work a week of early mornings on the website and this happens to fall after a week of lates, do it. It’s interesting and you might find yourself asked to do it more often.
3. If subs start being co-opted onto the newsdesk to work with the editors, hassle and cajole whoever does your rotas to be given the same chance. If this is happening, it won’t be an experiment, merely the start of a process which will see the two roles - news editor and sub - become one and the same.
4. Get some friendly news editor to teach you about commissioning.
5. Learn to use your company’s content management system (CMS). Do this in your own time if you’re not offered formal training. Come in a couple of hours early for a week. It’s a blast.
6. Learn about search engine optimisation (SEO). Become an expert on it. Constantly check the most popular section on Google News to see what’s playing well. Use Wordtracker to find the most-searched-for terms and tell the reporters and the desk when they’re getting it wrong.
7. Sign up to Digg, Reddit and six or seven of the other aggregators and start seeding your website’s content. Build networks of friends on the aggregators. Make sure you seed plenty of other stufff, too - you’ll find that other seeders will ignore you if you only propagate one site’s content.
8. Stop pestering the communities editor for a blog and start generating some real content that might actually drive some traffic our way. Acquaint yourself with what (within the boundaries of taste and decency) plays well on the aggregators and then dive deep into the blogosphere to find the weird stuff that drives traffic - you’ll find the kind of thing at the top of the most viewed list on your website. Don’t turn your nose up at this - we’re still at the stage of the web’s development when traffic drivers are vital for news organisations as they scrap over who’s got the No. 1 UK news website. When we’ve figured out how to turn unique users into hard cash, then we’ll have another strategy.
9. The foreign guys are - in most cases - poor at pushing out web content. Go and offer to do it for them. In fact, why not become the first sub to become embedded on the foreign desk? Offer to sit next to the foreign editor and push out web content and build the newspaper section with him.
10. Go through a week’s papers and start templating the most common shapes. Build your own InDesign library. Some of your colleagues will probably sneer at you for doing this but it’ll mean you can turn pages around faster, releasing you to write more stuff for the website.
11. Post moderate the website. Tell the editor you’re doing this. Find out when it’s wise to republish stories with major changes and when it’s best just to save the existing file. This is to do with how Google indexes pages - go and ask the web editor or the SEO bloke why this is so important.
12. If the night editor or head of production or whatever he or she calls himself or herself is not really playing ball in your bid for career survival, go and bang on the door of the Editor. Ask him or her where the hell the integration that he or she promised is. Tell him or her that you’d like an immediate transfer to the reporting team to start driving traffic. Tell him or her you’d like to help in the quest for 25 million unique users.

That’s it for now. I’m sure other stuff will occur to be as this snowball starts rolling.

You have a window in which you can save your career in journalism. But that window is closing and will be tight shut within the next six to 12 months.

Your immediate boss is probably so deep down in the bunker that he or she is not going to help you with this. You’ve got to do something about it yourself.