But Crawley, who also edited the Newcastle Journal between 1979 and 1987, has some strikingly new ideas about the future of journalism.
“If you’d asked me ten years ago, I’d have said that newsrooms would be largely resistant to being told what to do by the machine,” he tells Press Gazette in a phone interview.
The ‘machine’ he refers to is Sophi, an artificial intelligence (AI) programme developed by the G&M to drive up digital subscriptions.
As well as managing the Globe’s paywall, Sophi is also effectively a website homepage editor and social media consultant who provides “decision-support tools for editors”.