Jack Schofield (journalist)


Jack Schofield was a British technology journalist. He wrote the Ask Jack column for The Guardian and preceding that covered technology for the newspaper from 1983 to 2010. He edited photography and computing periodicals and produced a number of books on photography and on computing, including The Darkroom Book.
He died on 31 March 2020 at the age of 72, following a heart attack on 27 March.
𝕏 jackschofield

Career

Schofield edited various photography magazines during the 1970s: Photo Technique, ''Film Making, You & Your Camera, and Zoom as well as the journal of the Royal Photographic Society, The Photographic Journal.
In 1983, he started writing a weekly computer column in Futures Micro Guardian, from its first issue, in The Guardian. He also became editor of the monthly Practical Computing in 1984. In September 1985 he joined The Guardian's staff to launch Computer Guardian, the newspaper's weekly computer supplement. He continued to cover technology for The Guardian until 2010 when he switched to solely writing the newspaper's Ask Jack column.
Schofield also wrote on computing for Reuters and blogged for ZDNet. He produced a number of books on photography and on computing.
Whilst working for The Guardian'', Schofield published what he referred to as his Laws of Computing which sought to help people understand the consequences of decisions about their data:
  1. Never put data into a program unless you can see exactly how to get it out
  2. Data doesn't really exist unless you have two copies of it
  3. The easier it is for you to access your data, the easier it is for someone else to access your data

Publications