What We Do Our primary business since 1996 has been providing news organizations with business and editorial strategies for profitable adaptation to New Media.
Our clients have included Advanced Publications, the British Broadcasting Corporation, Dagbladet of Oslo, Founder Group of Hong Kong, the of Dublin, the Mail & Guardian of Johannesburg, the Media Development Loan Fund, MediaNews Group, the (U.S.) National Cancer Institute, The New York Times, Playboy, PR Newswire, PressPoint, Pulitzer Publishing, Staples, and Topix.
We also organize and teach conference programs and seminars about how New Media affect news media and public relations and about ways to report news or tell public relations stories effectively in the 21st Century. These recently have ranged from co-chairing and co-moderating Ifra's international Beyond the Printed Word newspaper New Media conference in Vienna to a storytelling workshop for the Johnson & Johnson's public relations Beauty Care Story Laboratory in San Francisco.
Since 2007, company founder Vin Crosbie teaches graduate school courses in New Media Business at Syracuse University's Newhouse School of Public Communication (you can follow him on Twitter).
"Vin Crosbie is widely regarded as one of the most outspoken and expert critics of how the newspaper industry worldwide and particularly in the United States has responded to the digital media revolution. But no one disputes that his is a critique borne of dedication to the newspaper tradition." - Ifra Next Engagements
Essentials of Managing Newspaper Convergence, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa, August 3-7.
Recent Engagements
Digital Entrepreneur Bootcamp, Knight Digital Media Center, Los Angeles, May 18-22, 2009
Mail & Guardian Strategic Retreat, Johannesburg, South Africa, March 12-15, 2009
The Art of Storytelling Workshop, Johnson & Johnson Beauty Care Story Laboratory, San Francisco, March 4-6, 2009
Media Development Loan Fund Designshop, Podgorica, Montenegro, November 19-24, 2008
University Courses
New Media Business, Fall 2009 Semester, S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York
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Speech to 228 Masters Degree Candidates
Graduate Convocation
Newhouse School of Public Communications
Syracuse University
July 6, 2009
You will expect me to tell you that you are special. It’s a standard thing to say in a masters’ class convocation speech.
Indeed, if I told you that you are a special class, you’ll simply think that I’m patronizing you. And no one would blame you for that.
However, something odd is happening today. This week. This month. This year. Something unusual and remarkable is occurring that, by happenstance, coincides with your lives. The time of your lives. You are 20, 25, at most maybe 30 years old?
Every class might think it is special. But I have the honor to state something that, I daresay, makes your class truly special — more special than any other class in the history of this distinguished institution.
You be the judges of what I am about to say:
For decades, we at the Newhouse School have taught the discipline and practice of public communications. We’ve taught — and will forever continue to teach — the core values of those disciplines and practices. Those core values will never change
However, during the past 20, 25, to 30 years – the spans of your lives – there has been a truly epochal change underway. It is the single greatest change in the history of media.
Ask yourselves –and ask most experts – what the single greatest change in the history of media is. You’re likely to get answers such as Gutenberg’s printing press. Or the invention of broadcasting. Or television. Or the Internet. Or Social Media. Or perhaps mobile phones or iPhones.
Yet all of those are only precursors, the first manifestations, of something even greater that’s happening now.
The greatest change has been that – within your lives – people’s access to media, and the information media conveys, has changed from scarcity to a deluge. From scarcity to cornucopia. From scarcity to some say information overload.
In decades, centuries, and millennia past, people had scarce access to information. Yet during your lifetimes – your young lifetimes – people’s access to media has reversed, from scarcity to a deluge.
You’ve never known scarcity. When your parents were your age and the Newhouse Two Building was built, or when your grandparent were your age and the Newhouse One Building was built, if they wanted daily changing information, their options were scarce.
No Internet. No mobile phones. No iPods or iTouches. No cable or satellite TV. Only ten of the 1,500 largest US. cities had more than four TV channels. Only 40 of those 1,500 cities had more than one daily newspaper distributed locally. The number of AM or FM radio stations you could receive could have been counted on your fingers (which is why there are only five or ten presets on most car radios).
Every day, people had just a printed newspaper. Less than four TV channels. And their radio. Scarce choices indeed.
Everybody watched those three or four TV channels; listened to that handful of radio stations; read that one local newspapers, because they had nothing else that gave them new information each day.
Scarcity! That was the situation for the past 200 years of American newspapers, 55 years of radio, and 45 years of TV – those media’s golden ages. Back then change was slow. Going from typewriters to the first word-processors took more a decade.
Yet look what’s happened during your lifetimes:
- For the older among you, the 1970s saw the rise of cable television (and later satellite television). No longer were there only three to four channels but there were dozens and now hundreds of channels. Not just the old general-interest channels, but topical channels. All news channels. All business channels. A cartoon channel, a biography channel, a science channel, travel channel, cooking channels, etc. Not just sports channels, but a tennis channel, a golf channel, a soccer channel, etc.
- The ‘80s brought developments in offset lithography that made production of topical (‘niche’) magazines economical. Newsstands that used to sell only one dozen or two dozen titles now sell hundreds.
- The ‘90s brought the Internet. The average American now has access to a quarter billion Web sites, including more than 100 millions blogs. If there is a particularly topic that interests you, you can find hundreds of Web sites devoted to it. The Internet also gave people access to the Web sites of every daily newspaper and every magazine on Earth.
- And our decade has given people all that at broadband speeds and with mobility. We have ‘always-on’ live access anywhere to all the information in the world, now including hundreds of millions of video clips, movies, and streaming signals from almost all of the world’s radio and TV stations, plus YouTube, Hulu, etc.. Last year, the Library of Congress announced that more information is now available online than in all the world’s books combined. And we can now have all that on iPhones and Google Android phones, too.
Since you began your schooling, 1.6 billion people have gotten Internet access – one quarter of humanity. Nearly one billion now have cable or satellite TV.
Three point four billion use mobile phones – one out of every two people on the planet. Most trade-up their handsets every two to three years. All the world’s handset manufacturers this year began manufacturing handsets on the iPod or Google Android all-screen model. That means that in two to three years half the world’s population will have always-on broadband Internet access wherever they go.
That’s all a gargantuan change within only a third of a human lifespan! Your life so far. A change greater than Gutenberg.
Historians say that Gutenberg’s invention of printed books sparked the Reformation. If that’s true, then let me ask you: What will half the world’s population having instant, live access, anywhere to all the information in the world spark? How will that change civilization and societies?
We’re only beginning to see how.
The Berlin Wall wouldn’t have withstood Twitter. The Vietnam War wouldn’t have withstood YouTube. Look at how your Iranian dissident counterparts are using Social Media today.
But more practically for you, this greatest change is radically reshaping the media industries. You’ve no doubt read what’s happening to the newspaper industry. The same things are beginning to happen to the broadcast and magazine industries. Hollywood and Bollywood are being transformed. The advertising and public relations industries are undergoing metamorphoses.
Forms of media are converging and diverging. The traditional packages of media are unbundling. The days of only publishers and broadcasters controlling media are ending. Media companies that were based upon the economics of scarcity are dying. New forms of media, journalism, advertising, film, public relations, and public diplomacy are being born.
All this is yours. It’s not your father’s media anymore. It’s yours.
People will always want to know what’s happening around them. They’ll always want to know what’s on sale and where to buy it. They’ll always want to be entertained and informed. They will need someone to guide them through the information overload. They’ll always need the core values of what we teach here at Newhouse. They will need all that from you.
The media your parents and grandparents lived with won’t be the media in which you work. You, not your predecessors, are in a unique situation.
You may not realize it, but you are special.
You’ll be riding the greatest change that’s ever happened in media. Forming it. Shaping it. Managing it. Changing the media industries. And prospering from it all.
You are it. Thank you. And welcome to Newhouse.
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 Dean Singleton Addressing Individuated Newspaper Conference Today and tomorrow I’m in Washington, D.C., attending the third annual Individual Newspapers Conference. Although I’m a bit too busy at it to write anything reflective about it yet, here are some highlights:
- Dean Singleton, the founder and CEO of the MediaNews Group newspaper chain (55 dailies) and the chairman of the Associated Press opened the conference by video. His chain takes the concept of Individuation of editions very seriously.
- The Washington Times (this year’s host of the conference) has just finished an experiment producing individuated editions for dozens of households. Sixty percent of the households reported that their expectation were “exceeded or greatly exceeded.”
- Newspaper executives who are experimenting with individuation are having to realize that each individual reader’s edition might contain a different number of pages that another reader’s, depending upon the individual’s choices of news. No more producing the same edition for everyone, even the same number of pages for everyone.
- MediaNews Group will to using Printcasting’s technologies for targeted special sections in SF, LA, Denver, Bakersfield. Printcasting founder and online publishing veteran Dan Pacheco also noted that Printcasting’s advertising CPMs have been averaging $30 to $50 versus online ads’ average CPMs of less than $1.
- Duncan Newton of Oce citing Frank Romano of RIT: digital presses will soon dominate over offset lithographic presses.
- Duncan Newton cited his comany’s latest digital press is capable of producting sixty 48-page tabloid-format individuated newspapers in two minutes. I asked him if that speed will soon increase, because if the average daily newspaper in the U.S. has 20,000 circulation, that digital press would take 11 hours to print those copies. Newton replied that he doesn’t foresee much increase in speed anytime soon. His company can make the presses wider, which might double their edition output, but the real factor limiting digital press speed is computer horsepower. To produce each copy different from every other copy, according to each individual subscriber’s choices of news, and do so at a 300 dot-per-inch resolution, requires phenomenal processing power. His company’s top-of-the-line digital press currently requires eight quad-processor CPUs to run it.
- MediaNews Group’s Peter Vandevanter says his company has 150K subscriptions to ‘personalized’ e-editions; the Washington Times has 10K.
- Gregor Dorsch of Syntops showing an individuated newspaper combining content from the Washington Post, The Washington Times, Die Welt, Der Standard, and Berliner Morgenpost. “Nobody in Switzerland is going to purchase an entire copy of The Washington Post, but individuated publishing allows them to read that paper’s top stories in any Swiss daily.”
- Starting October 1, PersonalNews in Switzerland, a Syntops print product, will sell individuated editions for €25 for 25 daily editions (six days a week). Each edition can contain the consumer’s choice of up to 10 sections of news.
Last month elsewhere, I wrote about the importance of providing services to mobile phones as the basis for any newspaper’s future services. I’m involved in a project in a small South Africa city in which mobile will be the key (the story at that hyperlink describes it).
I’d written, rather bluntly, that I don’t particularly care what online business model saves The New York Times or The Daily Telegraph or National Post or Le Monde. Those national publications’ journalism certainly is worth saving, but national publications are atypical. What’s really needed is a business model that can save much smaller daily newspapers, those with less than 100,000 circulation. Those comprise more than 95 percent of the world’s newspapers.
I today spent quite a bit of the day examining Nokia’s Life Tools project. On Sunday, CIO magazine published a brief article outlining the project. It notes:
Life Tools includes a range of services aimed at rural mobile users in emerging markets, where agriculture remains a mainstay of local economies.
Agriculture-related offerings on Life Tools include local weather forecasts, information on crop prices at local markets, advice on growing crops, as well as pricing information for pesticides, seeds and fertilizer. Educational services include English lessons and advice on taking exams, while sports scores and music are available for entertainment.
While agriculture-related services might not be attractive to small newspapers in post-industrial countries, such services are very important in more than 170 other countries worldwide, countries where most of the world’s population lives.
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Moreover, what I’ve been discovering over the past several years is that newspapers need to develop their mobile phone services the opposite way that newspapers developed services in their printed editions.
Newspapers have been printed for more than 400 years. The original newspapers printed only news (hence the name newspapers), but over the centuries other information was added: advertising, scores calendars of events, cartoons, stock prices, dining & entertainment listings, horoscopes, etc.
Today, however, newspapers that use mobile phones only to offer news won’t gain very many mobile users. But if they instead offer mobile services providing dining & entertainment listings, horoscopes, calendars of events, services that match consumers and local merchants, etc., those newspapers’ mobile services will then have enough usage to be profitably able to provide news.
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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 no gangster, and I’ve somehow always expected to get back into blogging.
During 2008, however, I’d come to the conclusion that my time spent blogging, twittering, or interacting in other casual and small ways with people online was counterproductive to solving the serious and huge problems nowadays facing the news industries — the focus of my professional consulting and teaching work. I reasoned that, like anyone else, my waking hours each day are limited, so blogging or twittering about la question de jour, and responding to blog comments, and getting involved in the casually chattering echosphere that much of Social Media has become, erodes my time to work on full solutions to the huge problems.
Many aficianados of blogging and twitter will assert that those practices are, are becoming, or will be, integral to solving the world’s great problems. Ask why, and most of those aficionados will be at a loss to tell you (except that it must be true because they do it?) More probative digerati will raise the premise of the Wisdom of Crowds. I’ve other friends who think that major problems can be solved through Samoan Circles and other novel or New Age means. I understand all the threads of promise in those premises, but I think that in everyday practice they tend to unweave and distract more than they sew.
Whether online or in person, if people from the problemmed industry assemble and talk, they’ll almost certainly progress no further than the latent conventional wisdoms that led and keep their industry in the problems. I teach my university students that the Wisdom of Crowds can help reveal truth but it can just as easy sustain falsity ((go ask the bloggers who still maintain that Elvis lives, that extraterrestials live among us, or that Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq had something to do with the September 11 Attacks). The ball & chain of Groupthink is just as prevalent, if not more, in Samoan Circle exercises than in corporate boardrooms. History clearly shows that breakthrough solutions arise from one or— at most— a remarkably small number of people who aren’t in power delving very deeply into the problems, rather than any large groups of people throwing ideas onto their chalkboards and seeing which proposed solutions might stick (hint: what sticks most often isn’t a solution) or any assemblies of the people under whose managements the problems occurred.
What block formulation of solutions at industry and academic conferences, Samoan Circle exercises, and on most of the blogosphere and twittersphere, are latent conventional wisdoms. Conventional wisdoms are generally defined as concepts and ideas that are generally accepted as true by the public or by experts in a field. Conventional wisdoms are difficult enough obstacles to overcome, but even more intransigent are latent conventional wisdoms — concepts and ideas to which people don’t realize they adhere. (For example, ’Newspapers aren’t working in print, so how can we create newspapers online?’ in which the concept that the package of information known as a newspaper must be transplanted and maintained is the latent convention wisdom. Likewise, many newspaper journalists fear that the demise of newspapers may mean the end of journalism. Their latent conventional wisdom is that newspapers — journalistic vehicles that have evolved over centuries — are the best of any possibly means for journalism.) The solutions to any serious, huge problem requires thorough analyses that delve to any root of the problem and doesn’t become seduced by either la question du jour or latent conventional wisdoms.
Moreover, most of my waking hours nowadays are devoted to teaching. I believe that I can have more affect solving the news media industry’s problems if I teach tomorrow’s leaders, rather than spend time casually blogging, tweeting, and otherwise interacting with the industry’s current leaders (very many of who are contributors to the problems). Call me cynical but, based on my experiences, I place more hope in the future than the present. Provided that tomorrow’s leaders aren’t taught today’s leaders’ latent conventional wisdoms, hope abounds.
Thus in 2008 I largely quit blogging. (I say largely because I’d occasionally post something about the death of colleagues, or twice a year post the syllabi for the university courses that I teach, so that professors at other universities can see those.) Indeed, I stopped blogging despite having posted the first parts of a series of essays in which I proposed the real root of the problems in the newspaper industry and was about to propose the solutions.
Because the newspaper industry’s huge problems require full explanations and detailed solutions, I refrained from blogging but continued writing towards the solutions. I intended to refrain from publishing until I was finished in full and detail. At nearly 20,000 words, in several sections, my work isn’t yet finished. I hope it will be this summer (Northern Hemisphere). I plan to publish it not in the form of a printed book but as either its own Web site or the major part of this site.
Yet I now realize that though my premise that blogging, twittering, and otherwise engaging in small interactions are huge distractions from solving huge problems is correct, my avoiding those small interactions helps only to make those problems worse, if even in small ways. There are things from my unfinished writing that I should be contributing to my industry’s discussions, even if my contributions are only in the forms of blog posts, short essays, or tweets. I should be contribute to prevent, wherever possible, my industry’s errors or drift.
Hence, I resume.
My unfinished writings focus on the one root cause of the media industries problems nowadays and how that root cause also contains the materials from which comprehensive solutions can be constructed. My larger work will detail that root cause, but my semimonthly Digital Publishing column at ClickZ.com on Friday briefly described it (I’d initially titled the column, The Greatest Change Made Newspapers Obsolete, but this root cause affects all media industries).
That ClickZ column begins:
Ask most people who think of themselves as new media experts what the greatest change in the media has been in the past 35 years, and you’ll hear such answers as ‘the Internet,’ ’social media,’ ’search engines,’ or ‘iPhones.’
They’re wrong.
The greatest change has been that people’s access to media has changed from scarcity to surfeit. It’s an even bigger change than Gutenberg’s invention of a practical printing press, the invention of writing, or even the first Neolithic cave paintings. It’s the greatest change in all of media history. And it occurred in only 35 years — half a human lifespan.
This unprecedented change (in effect, a reversal) in the balance of Supply & Demand for information is totally reshaping the media environment. It’s why so many major daily newspapers in post-industrial countries are going out-of-business; why listenership and viewership of general-interest broadcast stations are eroding and their network affiliation structures are beginning to implode; why the numbers of sales of musical albums and of tickets at cinemas are declining; and why consumers, rather than publishers and broadcasters, are not only taking control of media but redefining how prices are set, what local and community mean, how news is packaged, and how advertising will be done.
None of that should create problems for industries that want to adapt to this change, and adapting to the change creates more efficient media for consumers and publishers and broadcasters and marketers. The problems arise because most components of the media industries don’t want to adapt. They don’t want to adapt because doing so requires systemic changes, rather than cosmetic changes (such as ‘convergence’ or repurposing of existing content), and also because these industries’ senior executives are either too myopic to see the change reshaping the media environment or else too fearful that their stockholders will begin to realize it was obviously these same senior executives’ lacks of foresight that led their companies into the problems (or, as Einstein once said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”)
If the unprecedented change in the balance of Supply & Demand for information — from scarce supply to surfeit supply or even information overload — is the root cause of the problems that media industries now face, how does the root cause contain materials from which comprehensive solutions can be constructed?
The solutions lay in understanding how this change affects pricing, packaging, the power balance between content providers and consumers, and even subjects such as what is local or what is community.
For examples, anyone who’s ever shopped in a bazaar, a flea market, or a souk knows how Supply & Demand affects power balance, pricing and packaging. When something is scarce but in demand, its seller has more power over the transaction than the buyer does. The seller controls the price and packaging (’If you want that, you also have to accept this,’ etc.) of the transaction. But when something is in demand but is surplus, then the buyer has more power over the transaction than the seller does. The buyer controls the price and packaging. All this about Supply & Demand is just as true in the media industries’ markets as in souks, flea markets, and bazaars. Few executives in the media industries understand this. They fail to understand why consumers who online nowadays have access to the contents of every news organization in the world won’t pay for the package of information (much of which is international and national news) that those same consumers would pay in the past when its printed version was their only available source of that content.
Moreover, very few media executives understand how Supply & Demand affects the definition of local news. When daily changing information in text format was scarce, the sellers of that information — newspaper publishers and their editors — controlled how local was defined. For the convenience of their businesses and practices, they defined local to mean their town or city or metropolitan or some similar single geo-demographic area. However, nowadays as consumers have gotten access to more sources of information — including local news via local bloggers and local news operations that are being started in those localities — the definition of local is beginning to shift out of the publishers’ and his editors’ hands and more into the hands of the consumers. (Control hasn’t passed the fulcrum point into primarily the consumers’ control, but it is becoming shared control rather than be unilaterally controlled by the publishers and editors.) Consumers have begun redefining local to mean something much more local than how the publishers and their editors defined the term. Consumers are refining local to mean something that those publishers and editors could understand by the terms hyperlocal or microlocal news.
I’ve compared usage logs from news sites that offer local news offered according to the publishers’ and editors’ definition and that being offered by hyperlocal/microlocal sites. The latter are much more popular among consumers than the wider geo-demographic definitions that the publishers and their editors had used. And why not? What occurs closest (i.e, on their street, in their neighborhood, along their commute) to consumers’ life is what interests them the most.
I’ll be blogging bits here and there about my larger thesis. I’m not resident at Syracuse or Rhodes universities (I’ve been teaching at Rhodes earlier this Spring and will again in late July and August, and teach at Syracuse the rest of the year).
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Speaking of academia, during a faculty meeting last year at a media school I know, a question arose about whether or not to teach students a course in numeracy. Because media professors tend to possess more verbal than mathematical talents, it wasn’t surprising that the question was voted down. One veteran professor who teaches writing noted, “Our incoming freshmen already have high test scores for math, so we don’t need to teach them that.” I bit my tongue and decided not to respond by noting that those incoming freshmen also have high verbal test scores and thus, according to that professor’s logic, the school shouldn’t need to teach them to write. However, I showed the faculty a copy of John Allen Paulos’ 1997 book, A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper, and mentioned that so many journalists are innumerate that there’s actually a book written about the problem.
I thought of that today when I today read an Editor & Publisher magazine story about how, despite salary freezes, the average salary at U.S. newspapers was actually rising and last week when I read a posting on the Newspaper Association of America’s Web site noting how subscription churn rates at those newspapers has markedly declined. Both those stories appear to be positive: salaries are rising at U.S. newspapers despite layoffs and salary freezes and subscription churn rates have declined a lot. However, do the math:
- As newspapers let go of their more marginal staffers and keep their more essential—presumably more veteran—staffers who are paid more than the marginal staffers, then mathematically the average wage at newspapers has to rise. The mathematical function is fairly obvious: as newspapers reduce all of their department staffs until only the most integral remain, the remaining staffers are likely to be those higher paid because they indeed were integral. Thus, staff reductions tend to increase the salary average. If the publisher were to let go of everyone but himself, you’d see a whopping increase in the average salary.
- Likewise, as newspapers’ circulations continue to decline, subscription churn will decline because those newspapers are losing so many marginal subscribers that only the most loyal are left
No surprises, except to the innumerate. Nevertheless, these types of stories get publicity because they superficially seem like good news amid all the bad. The industry associations’ public relations departments spin out press releases touting these ‘good’ things — one can’t blame the PR departments for that: it’s their jobs —and the journalists who report about the industry delve any further than that into what the numbers mean . Indeed, public relations departments often rely on overworked trade journalists not delving beyond and instead taking the ‘good’ spin verbatim.
PaidContent.org was where I first became aware of the story about the average wage rising at U.S. newspapers. It’s the site I use most to find news stories about the New Media business. It’s unusually competent because its staff of journalists most often does delve beyond the spin in press releases and reports issues by the public relations departments of media companies and trade associations.
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Speaking of competency or its lack, in a backhanded remark one year ago May, I disparaged the Newspaper Association of America’s annual Connections conference about New Media. I was incompetent doing so. I was commenting on one of PBS’s Web blogs about why I’ve largely stopped attending the annual New Media conference that Editor & Publisher and MEDIAWEEK magazines hold, and I made a remark about NAA’s Connections conferences (now know as MediaXchange) being even worse. I soon received an e-mail from Randy Bennett, the senior vice president of business development at NAA, who wrote:
I read your comment on the Mediashift blog about NAA’s interactive conferences being worse than E&P’s event, and, presumably others. I was dismayed by your evaluation given that you have not been to the NAA event, as far as I can tell, in several years. At minimum, a guy like you who champions the truth should have disclosed that, in fact, you had not attended an NAA interactive event recently and that your judgment was based on, perhaps, previous experience from several years ago or from hearsay.
I certainly don’t begrudge any criticism (although your comment was not particularly constructive), but in a public forum I would expect that you would have been more forthcoming about your perspective.
He is entirely correct. I hadn’t been to the Connections conference in several years and so shouldn’t have been judging whether it was better or worse than another. I didn’t respond to Randy, instead meaning to post a correction (what I’m writing now) here that day or the next. However, by happenstance that May was when I basically stopped blogging for the 19 months .
Now that I resume blogging, it’s only right that I post that correction now, albeit unconscionable a year late!
Moreover, Bennett is one of the most competent executives in the U.S. newspaper industry. For some reason, he and I never really quite got along (perhaps it was my strong personality or because since 1995 I’ve been very critical of the U.S. newspaper industry’s path). But make no mistake: he’s done phenomenal work over the years, despite the titanic forces of change that have gone against his industry. While working in Africa earlier this season, I was dismayed to hear about the NAA cutting almost half of its staff, but I was glad to hear that he was not among those cut.
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I’m spending much of the Southern Hemisphere’s winter (Northern Hemisphere’s summer) 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. I’ve not previously written about this project, and am a bit constrained doing so no simply because my Internet connectivity here 500 miles east of Capetown is severely limited (but if you want to bump into wild rhinos, I can help you). Nevertheless, my most recent digital publishing biweekly column at ClickZ.com describes some of the project.
I’ve been in the SA since mid-April and will return to the US on May 10th. I’ll then spend a week in Syracuse teaching the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication’s Social Media course in its Executive Education in Public Relations master’s degree program, then a week in Los Angeles, co-teaching the Knight Digital Media Center’s Digital Media Entrepreneurship Boot Camp. After a June vacation, I’ll then return to the SA and this main project in July.
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