Hugo Rifkind is arguably one of the leading lights of journalism, working as a columnist at The Times, The Spectator and GQ amongst many other commitments, and he is passionate in his assertion that journalism is a “vocation”, not just a job – and one that has its own “cultish aspects”. Rifkind, however, displays none of the optimistic blindness often identified with the cultish: he talks pragmatically and movingly about the dire trouble the newspaper business is in. “Newspapers are the churches of journalism”, he declares, and reminisces about the feeling of going down to the press – “blind drunk”, but I assume that wasn’t mandatory – and seeing your own words appearing on the newly printed papers.

Rifkind, who read Philosophy at Cambridge, is fittingly reflective in his discussion of what this might mean for journalism and society as a whole: he believes that newspapers are vitally important in the role they play in society because they “create a national conversation”, and make sure people’s attention is drawn to issues of national and global importance that otherwise, given the selective nature of the internet, might completely pass them by.

The demise of the print newspaper has been the source of much hand-wringing in recent months, and Rifkind uses a recent front page of The Sun as an epitomise of the changes the newspaper industry has undergone. The front page in question featured a mock-up of Prince Harry’s infamous nude pictures and, Rifkind believes, showed the “impending obsolescence of newspapers roaring out”: for the first time the debate about whether to publish the actual picture or not was not about releasing hitherto unknown information to the public as, thanks to the internet, the public had already seen the incriminating photographs, enabling the tabloid to publish an instantly recognisable mock-up without technically breaching the privacy of the Royal family.

The change internet news has wrought upon the newspaper industry is unavoidable, and Rifkind is matter of fact in his belief that a crisis point has been reached. The Times paywall is an attempt to solve this problem, at least temporarily, and the initially slightly controversial strategy was a source of trepidation for journalists as well as readers, with Rifkind noting that the concern was largely that when readers have to pay for the privilege of reading your work “you lose a degree of voice and you can lose your relevance”. He goes on to say, though, that on the whole this has not happened as was feared and the strategy is working, at least for now, in combating the problems of a declining print audience.

Before becoming a columnist and rising through the ranks of opinion hierarchy, Rifkind used to be, in his own words, a “self-loathing diary columnist”, and his anecdotes about working the showbiz diary circuit as a nervous graduate are as cringe-worthy as they are hilarious, including a particularly toe-curling incident when a fellow diarist accidentally told Martin Amis to fuck off. The ridiculous aspects of celebrity culture and life on the soul-destroying diary circuit are also the topic of Overexposure, his only foray into fiction thus far, but in a bizarre coincidence the book was actually written before he took over as the diarist at The Times. Rifkind talks of how perpetually “amazed” he found himself as the “witheringly tired and cynical” way in which he had imagined the life of a showbiz writer was eerily similar to the actual situations he was now finding himself in, and although there is a certain fondness in his wry reminiscence, he doesn’t miss the lack of fulfilment provided by the job: “You never produce something you look back on and are proud of”.

Another aspect of our digital age that has had a huge impact on journalism is of course the ubiquitous Twitter. Rifkind is, unsurprisingly, an avid tweeter and he talks approvingly about the “immediacy” it provides, although he goes on to worry about whether the “performative” aspect of the site is cliquey. On the perils of meeting people at parties whom you only know through the comfortable distance of the twittersphere he says: “you stand and chat but after 140 characters you realise you’ve run out of things to say to one another”.

Conversely, Rifkind has found the slightly more solid friendships he made during his own time at Cambridge to be very different from the awkward social negotiations of the internet. He refers to the friends he made during his three years as an undergraduate at Emmanuel college as the definitive aspect of his university experience – along with meeting his wife. Of his course, he says he enjoyed Philosophy “a bit”, but “really I saw the academic side of things as entirely incidental as to why I was there”. He credits his degree with giving him a “ruthlessly logical” side to his character, but wonders whether the essay writing skills honed by the Tripos system might actually be detrimental for any other kind of writing: writing academically “tends to encourage you towards the dry, towards the anodyne, at least from a stylistic point of view”.

One thing Rifkind does regret about his time at Cambridge is not getting involved with more extra-curricular activities – “I do regret somewhat that I never took the chance to do any of the myriad of things you can try at Cambridge; I never did stand-up, I never directed a play or played any college sport” – but he values instead the “quiet personality development” that three years without giving any thought to being a big name on campus provided, and he talks of his time here with a real fondness. He speaks of the sheer delight of the place itself, of the particular kind of magic present in a Cambridge autumn: “there is something about the tightness of the cold air that you don’t get anywhere else”.

Hugo Rifkind has moved on to bigger and more exciting things than his time spent here amongst the cobbles and colleges of our familiar city, but he still feels an affinity with Cambridge that one imagines will never really leave, both of which offer a faint ray of hope for students already fearing the approaching end of their time here and facing the big bad world of Real Life.