AOL Time Warner The Spammer

For more than eight years, Pathfinder.com has been the oxymoron of online publishing. Pathfinder and its parent company, AOL Time Warner (soon to be renamed Time Warner) are the poster children for Mass Media cluelessness about New Media.

So, no one should be surprised about the bad e-mail experiences that Seattle Times Columnist Charles Burmont had when:

“I recently sent a letter to

magazine, expressing my displeasure about its omission of Jerry Lewis from an article about

.
“I received a 500-word automated reply within five minutes, covering a variety of topics from back-issue orders, photo requests to editorial submissions.
“But unlike many AOL Time Warner publications, this particular missive buried the lead at the end:

“So now we know how spam gets started. And we also have a clear demonstration between ‘opt in’ and ‘opt out.’
“Once you get on an AOL Time Warner list, it’s hard to believe that you won’t end up on another one.
“And it’s equally likely that — no matter what privacy protection they claim at this point — it won’t be too long before your address is passed on to quite a few places.
“Since I didn’t ‘opt out’ here, I can expect an increasing quantity of spam from all branches of this media conglomerate. (However, if you do choose to opt out at this point, it’s probable that they will scratch you off the list.)
“So there is no way to butter this up: AOL Time Warner is a spammer. “

For another example of a Mass Media company that doesn’t understand how e-mail should be used, check out this brief story about Tribune Interactive.

What We Do

Since 1996, the media business consulting firm of Digital Deliverance has provided publishers and broadcasters on four continents with strategic reviews and advice about how to profitably adapt to the epochal changes that computer-mediated technologies have wrought on the media environment and their industries.

Over the years, the firm’s clients have include The New York Times, News Corporation, The Irish Times of Dublin, Dagbladet of Oslo, The Mail & Guardian of Johannesburg, Advance Publications, Critical Mention, MediaNews Group, New Century Network, the Media Development Investment Fund, the National Cancer Institutes, and scores of other media firms that need to adapt to computer-mediated technologies and the rise of Individuated Media.

The managing partner of Digital Deliverance is Vin Crosbie, Adjunct Professor of postgraduate New Media Management at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication, in upstate New York. From 2007 through 2020, he wrote and was the sole instructor of the school’s New Media Business course, a course required for students in the New Media Management master’s degree curriculuum, an elective course for Ph.D. students, and a permission-only course for selected undergraduates and graduate students.

Digital Deliverance is incorporated as a limited liability company in the U.S. state of Connecticut, where it is based in the city of Norwich, Connecticut.