Pressing ‘Reset’

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…

My Family Ending 140 Years as Daily Newspaper Publishers

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…

New Media Chromodynamics – Part 1: Human Nature Augmented by Technology

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…

The Prism & New Media Chromodynamics

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…

The Spectrum of Change

  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…

Maelstrom as the Media Flow Changes

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…

Personalization, Customization, Individuation, and New Media

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…

Why Web 3 Will Sink Traditional Media

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…

Social Media and Other Early Platforms for Individuation

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…

The Rise of Search Engines Heralds Individuated Media

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…

The Significance of Web 1 (‘Web.1.0’) and Web 2 (‘Web 2.0’)

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…

Corollaries of Moore’s, Cooper’s, and Butters’ Laws Interactions

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…

When Moore’s, Cooper’s, and Butters’ Laws Interact on Media

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…

Butter’s Law Acting on Media

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…

Proximate Remarks & Ultimate Causations

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…

The First Innovative Thing I’ve Posted in Seven Years

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…

Digital Deliverance on 27 October 2014

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…

Purchase a Brick for Malaysiakini

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 Successfully Transitions off Print

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…

Journalism Schools’ Myopia When ‘Testing’ Google Glasses

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…

The Epochal Change That The Rise of Social Media Demarcates

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…

Citizen Journalism Absent in the Arab Press

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…

Savvy Articles About Change or Its Lack in News Media

Here are some savvy articles about how media is changing, will change radically, and why its companies might not be adapting to change.

Regarding Academic Research and Fatuous Reporting About Trouble Media Industries

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…

The Greatest Change in Media Made Newspapers Obsolete

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…