This week I’m in New York City sitting-in on a 39-hour (nearly non-stop for five-business days) course in which 18 alumni of my New Media Management master’s degree program at Syracuse University will teach 18 of my current students in the program.…
In 1993, after two decades working for newspapers’ print editions and for two of the world’s major international news services, I switched the focus of my career to working full-time on journalism’s transition from print and terrestrial or cable and satellite broadcasting…
With nostalgia and some sadness, my family today announced that after 140 years, it’s leaving the newspaper business on May 1st. The daily Chronicle of Willimantic, Connecticut, founded by my step-great-great-grandfather John A. MacDonald in 1877, will be sold at the end…
Previous webpage: The Prism and New Media Chromodynamics The ‘Greens’ — A New Gravity When people’s access and choices of news, entertainment, and other information switches from relative scarcity to surplus, each person naturally gravitates to whatever mix of items from the entire…
Previous webpage: The Spectrum of Change The ideal prism with which to refract and examine the entire spectrum of change underway in the media environment, now that people’s access and choices of news, entertainment, and other information has changed from relative scarcity…
Previous webpage: Maelstrom as the Flow Changes “I wasalmost a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor.” — Nikolai Tesla about Thomas Edison’s exhaustive experimentations. Access and…
Previous webpage: Personalization, Customization, Individuation, and New Media. A spectacularly obvious but remarkably little noticed aspect of the epochal change underway in the media environment is a reversal of the locus where contents are consumed. By locus or loci, I don’t mean what…
Previous webpage: Social Media and Early Platforms for Individuation. Many media executives and media academicians inadvertently conflate the differences between the terms personalization, customization, and individuation. The terms differ in meaning. Here is a primer about correct usage: Personalization is a form of…
Previous webpage: The Malestrom as Flow Reverses Much like how marketers affixed unnecessary decimal points to the terms Web 1 and Web 2, they’ve begun to misuse the term Web 3. Some term Web 3 (or ‘Web 3.0’) to be anything they happen…
Previous webpage: The Rise of Search Engines Heralds Individuated Media Since the new millennium began, billions of people have discovered a more practical way to obtain a customized supply of news, entertainment, and other information than manually using search engines or revisiting numerous…
Previous webpage: The Significance of Web 1 (‘Web.1.0’) and Web 2 (‘Web 2.0’) Why did more than three billion people begin routinely using the Web when they were already being served news, entertainment, and other information by the publications and broadcasts of…
Previous webpage: Some Corollaries of the Interactions of Moore’s, Cooper’s, and Butters’ Laws As Moore’s, Cooper’s, and Butters’ laws exponentially increased the power of computer chips and the bandwidth of the fiber optic lines and wireless signals connecting those chips, billions of people…
Previous webpage: When Moore’s, Cooper’s, and Butters’ Laws Interact on Media Here are some corollary effects resulting from observable dynamics of Moore’s, Cooper’s, and Butters’ laws. These go beyond the computer and telecommunications industries from which those dynamics directly stem and beyond the…
Previous webpage: Butters’ Law Acting on Media Alone, neither Moore’s Law nor Cooper’s Law nor Butter’s Law would have led to the world we know today and the one we will know in the future. During the past 50 years, Moore’s Law, without…
Previous webpage: Cooper’s Law Acting on Media We don’t live in a ‘wired’ world, but a ‘fibered’ world. Wired communications is obsolete. Metallic wires could never have sustained the phenomenal growth of the Internet and of the global telecommunications networks in general. The…
One of the most audacious New Media projects I’ve been involved with as a viability consultant is Outernet, my friend Syed Karim‘s project to bring free Internet access to more than four billion people. He plans to do this by piggybacking a…
Previous webpage: The Greatest Change in the History of Media Let’s be frank about the media industries. Most of its executives don’t care a hoot about exactly what is causing the tumultuous changes in their business environment. What they want, almost regardless of…
My reputation as a New Media consultant to the news industry, including my appointment since 2007 to teach postgraduate New Media Business at Syracuse’s Newhouse School, largely result from work I did long ago. For ten years beginning in 1993, I helped…
Today is Digital Deliverance Managing Partner Vin Crosbie‘s 59th birthday, which means the start of his 60th year (which he will complete a year from today). ‡ What happens when applied Social Media conflicts with existing laws? This month, the New York State…
In 2004, the offices the Malaysian investigative news website Malaysiakini rented in the Kuala Lumpur suburb of Bangsar Utama were raided by police. That spooked the building’s landlord, who evicted the 14 year-old Malaysiakini. The site’s journalists briefly worked from a nearby…
The world’s longest-published newspaper will become a non-printed, totally online service nine weeks from now. On 20 December, Lloyd’s List, which has been continuously published since 1734, will no longer be available in print. It’s online edition for the Web have has…
How will journalists could use Google Glasses ? It’s the wrong question. The right question for journalists to ask is how and why will people who consume media use Google Glasses (or similarly wearable optic interfaces)? Whenever I encounter media professors or…
Whenever anyone from the traditional media industries writes, blogs, or tweets about Social Media, they miss the point. I find this so exasperating that I want to stab them with the point. Here is my thrust: When newspaper, magazine, radio, and television…
My thanks to Dr. Khalid Mohammed Ghazi, editor of the Cairo-based Arab Press Agency, for citing some of my work in his editorial, صحافة المواطن.. غائبة عن الصحافة العربية (Citizen Journalism…Absent from the Arab Press), published on Wednesday in, among other newspapers, Al…
Why Americans who don’t use the Internet don’t use it.
Here are some savvy articles about how media is changing, will change radically, and why its companies might not be adapting to change.
Many of the media industries for which journalism and media professors prepare students are, if not yet dying, seriously ill, stumbling if not yet in collapse due to titanic changes underway. Ten days ago, I published here a call for American journalism…
I’ve overwhelmingly tempted to quote words written for the Michael Corleone character by Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola in their 1990 movie and novel The Godfather III: “Just when I thought I was out… they pull me back in.” Except that I’m…
I’m spending much of the next few months in the Republic of South Africa where I’m helping that country’s leading journalism school in what I hope will be a notable advance in how journalism and news publishing are practiced in the 21st Century.
Syllabus for my Digital Media Management lectures during the next three weeks at Rhodes University’s Sol Plaatje Institute for Media Leadership.
Despite its complication, a game of chess is basically a three-act play. So too is our current, transitional era for media companies.
My biweekly Digital Publishing column at ClickZ.com is about the skills that journalism schools need to teach in this century.