For the next three weeks, I’ll be lecturing on Digital Media Management at the Sol Plaatje Institute for Media Leadership, at Rhodes University‘s School of Journalism and Media Studies, in Grahamstown, Eastern Cape, South Africa. These lectures will be based upon the New Media Business graduate school course that I teach at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, in the United States.
Here is the syllabus for these lectures:
Monday, 20 April – Embracing Change. The instructor, the syllabus, and what your expectations are in this class. Why the most important skill to the skill to learn new skills. The first book. How Moore’s Law is causing the ever accelerating pace of change. The future is here, but unevenly distributed. The 40 to 100-year cycles of change. Embracing constant change.
Tuesday, 21 April – A World of Serenity & Maelstroms There is no Single Way Worldwide. The Only Borders are Language and Culture. Lands of temperate construction. Lands of Creative Destruction. Where the Epicenters are. Media in Crisis. The Epic video. Why some countries’ newspaper industries are collapsing. Why some countries’ broadcast industries are about to implode. How the cinema industry will change. The Pit of Active Inertia. The ‘Muddle Through’ Morass. If You Have to Think Outside the Box, the Box is the Problem.
Thursday, 23 April – What has been the Single Greatest Change in Media during the Past 400 Years? How scarcity turned to surplus and is ending the Mass Media era. What Makes Individuals? The gravitation of Consumers. The myth of Fragmentation. How control shifts out of the hands of publishers and broadcasters and becomes shared with consumers. How supply & demand affects media management: How it affects the price of news and information. Why information doesn’t necessarily want to be free. How it affects scheduling. How it redefines local. What are Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, and Web 3.0 or the Semantic Web, and why each is significant?
Friday, 24 April –– What do Digital, Interactive, and New Media Mean? Why the true definitions of these terms matter in a world of hype. What is digital and how do its technologies work? What is interactive and how does it work? What characteristics and capabilities make these different than traditional forms of media? What is or are New Media? Is there a New Medium? The four common characteristics of successful New Media business plans: ‘Bits not atoms.’ Digital addressability. Quantum shift in control over media. Why Open systems triumph over Proprietary systems.
Tuesday, 28 April – How Do New Media Differ Legally and Economically from Traditional Media? How laws governing publishing, broadcasting, marketing, and advertising in New Media differ from those governing traditional media: COPA, SPAM, spyware. cybersquatting, copyrights and royalties, digital rights management, personal and foreign jurisdictions, ‘Safe Harbors’, etc. The conflations of daily and monthly users. Behaviorals versus Demographics. Why it takes 50 to 100 online users to make up for the revenue lost losing one traditional media user. The economics of scarcity versus the economics of surplus. Permission Marketing. Personalization and its technologies. What will people pay for online content, when, and why? The three criteria for successful pricing of information online.
Wednesday, 29 April — Website Don’t Deliver. How the Internet works. HTML and CSS. Web servers and server logs. Clickstreams and metrics. Web analytics. Electronic mail publishing/marketing. Really Simply Syndication. The gaps in the world’s most accountable form of media.
Thursday, 30 April — Online Advertising. The brief history of online advertising. ‘Rich media’ online ads. clickthroughs. Landing pages and microsites. Targeting by demographics, context, behavior, geography, affinity, or purchases. Dayparting. Online Advertising Networks. Phorm.‘Dutch auctions’ and Google. Costs per Thousand (CPM) versus Costs per Clickthrough versus Costs per Action.
Monday, 4 May– Electronic Paper and Social Media. PDFs and digital editions. Remote printing. Electronic paper, Kindles, OLEDs, and digital presses. How to publish, manage, market, and advertise on chat boards, blogs, MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, virtual worlds, and other current or future forms of Social Media.
Tuesday, 5 May– Radio, Television, and Cinema Go Online. Webcasting, podcasting, vodcasting, peer-to-Peer, BitTorrent, Hulu, and YouTube. Why Blue-Ray’s victory over HD DVD will be moot.
Wednesday, 6 May – Search Engine Optimization/Search Engine Marketing. The roles of search engines online. Why more than half of all online advertising today is about search engine marketing. How does search engine optimization work? How does search engine marketing work?
Thursday, 7 May – The Mobile World. Publishing or broadcasting to mobile phones, Playstations, iPhones, and other mobile devices. WiFi, WiMax, 2.5G, 3G, 4G, and 5G. , New forms of broadcast that are unique to New Media. A world of ambient information.
Friday, 8 May: 9am-12.39pm – The Resolution of New and Traditional Media What is XML, Exif, NewsML, AdML. Open Source or Closed Sources? Mashups? How and why metadata controls content distribution in the 21st Century? Editorial workflows in the 21st Century.
I’ve a list of readings and assignments for each lecture, but keep those proprietary.