Due to internal changes here at Digital Deliverance, transcontinental travel, some speaking engagements, influenza, and some unexpected new clients, I haven’t posted much here during the past week. After all, freely posting news & commentary here is of lesser importance than health, serving clients, and administering the business itself. Nonetheless, I’m back and catching up.
On Sunday, I’ll be leaving for Editor & Publisher and MediaWeek magazines’ Interactive Media Conference & Tradeshow — Making Your Web Site a Mass Medium in a Fragmented Market, a title that doubly shows how those conference host magazines lack understanding of interactivity and of the changes underway in media.
Most of the websites of newspaper executives who will attend this conference offer multimedia to their consumers, but precious few offer interactivity. Moreover, most of the newspaper executives who will attend would give half their retirement pay if only newspapers (online and in print) could successfully remain a mass medium during an era when media are fragmenting, but during the past 30 years (yes, media fragmentation predates the World Wide Web) newspapers’ position as a mass medium has been continually eroding and online publishing hasn’t changed that during the past ten years. E&P and MediaWeek would do better to hold a conference about how newspapers can utilize the fragementation and change, rather than try to fight it and preserve the past.