Posted in media on Aug 20th, 2010
I’ve recently become obsessed with YouTube. In particular, I’ve been watching people who are creating mini-media brands by reviewing products in very specific niches. Before I dig into the videos themselves, I want to share why I am so enamored with them. An entire generation is growing with the content, marketing, sales, and technical skills [...]
Posted in journalists, media on Jul 23rd, 2010
I’ve been reading about how companies such as Demand Media, Examiner.com, and Suite101 – those “content farms” – train their contributors on writing and web skills. These companies put a strong focus on creating efficient systems to organize a large group of people to do specific tasks. “Early on we decided there would be four [...]
Today is my last day at Reed Business Information, after a decade of service. It has been an incredible journey, and I wanted to reflect a bit on it. I started in December of 2000, just as the first dot com bubble was popping. The past decade was the perfect time to be within a [...]
Posted in magazines, media, newspapers on Jun 18th, 2010
A reporter interviewed me this week for an article about the future of local newspapers. At first, he referred to the terms ‘newspaper’ and ‘journalism’ interchangeably, and I clarified that the lack of a definition for journalism is what hobbles many conversations about the future of newspapers. Newspapers are not a product, they are a [...]
Posted in media on May 28th, 2010
Image by neilfein Why are the record labels in such a bad place? Because in a time of enormous change, they focused on the medium, not the mission. They focused on the physical product, not the value it delivered. Sure, they tried to innovate, but in all the wrong ways. They told themselves that the [...]
Posted in innovation, media on Jan 20th, 2010
Image by Jim The nonconformist is the outcast. And we need more outcasts. Media needs more outcasts. Why? Because the outcast can find success that others have not by looking at the world in a wholly different way. For a media brand, this does not mean to try crazy ideas, but to do primary research, [...]
Image by Raphaël Fauveau The New York Times homepage has more than 300 things you can click on, and includes more than 2,000 words. Is this how the brand sees themselves? Is this providing value to advertisers? Is this the best experience for their audience? Perhaps that is a difficult question to answer for a [...]
"It’s really scary out there." That’s a phrase I keep hearing again and again. When I consider the challenges facing editors & content creators, among them is the fact that they have precious few resources to do a massive amount of work. On top of that, there is a constant barrage of reports of their [...]
Image by Amy Millward While many bemoan the changes that are occurring as our culture moves from print to digital media creation and consumption, I wanted to consider the value of digital media if we were experiencing the opposite transition: What if we were moving from a digital media world to a print media world? [...]
Posted in B2B, Publishing, media on Jul 30th, 2009
I love magazines. There is something about reading Runners World, The New Yorker and Toyfare that completely engrosses me. Of course, the magazines I spend the most time considering are business-to-business trade publications – especially my beloved Reed Business Information titles. It is endlessly fascinating to think about the differences between librarians who read Library [...]