It’s easy for kids like me to imitate professionals. Look at big newspapers in the world and copy them. This can affect the ideas you try, the tone you create, the conventions surrounding headlines and photos and layout and everything. There’s a sense that straying from how Big Boys do things is a mistake, one made because there’s a novice decision-maker behind the scenes who hasn’t quite figured out how they do it.

But is there any reason why the Big Boys are the authority?

For years the newspaper industry battled with itself. Its standards and conventions were used to defend the newspaper’s authority while readers yawned and looked elsewhere. The new objectivity was born online. The industry changed. But despite all this the newspaper stayed the course, buried beneath conviction in its own tired ways.

It’s okay to not do things like the Big Boys do. In fact it’s necessary. You can do the exact opposite in fact. So long as the intentions are true and the meaning remains. Try, fail, try harder, fail harder. The Big Boys can stick with what they know while the young try to reinvent them. Doing this consciously as least gives you the satisfaction that these differences aren’t mistakes. They’re intentional attacks at the status quo.