What I hadn’t anticipated in May when I wrote the previous post was the legal, financial, logistic, and otherwise bureaucratic time consumption of something I’d meanwhile been arranging: I am now a legal resident of Spain. Since that posting May, I’ve obtained a Spanish residency visa and European work permit, both good through this decade. I’ve retained my U.S. citizenship, but am eligible for Spanish citizenship (dual citizenship) also in 12 months. I haven’t decided about that; it hasn’t been my aim. Time and residency will tell.
Although I’ve recently sold my family’s newspaper business in Connecticut, my home in that state’s city of Stamford, my family’s beach house on the Connecticut shore, and the only assets that I now own in the U.S. are my eight-year-old car, my bank and investment accounts, and my 30-year-old consulting company, I’ve retain a long-term lease on a condominium, owned by South African friends, in the western Connecticut hills 80 miles (130 km) north of New York City.
Forty years ago, while working in New York City as an employee of international companies, I had wanted to work abroad instead. However, most of the folks whom I knew working abroad for those companies wanted to work New York City instead. Although some of those friends suggested that we switch locations, the fact that wanted to work in New York City instead, plus that I was then married to someone with a job in nearby Connecticut, led me to keep working from New York City.
When I started my own company 30 years ago, whose purpose was to consult about New Media to media companies in the United States, it rapidly became apparent to me that there is even more aggregate demand abroad for such consulting. In 1997, I began consulting to European media companies and by 2000 had clients from five continents. I’ve co-chaired and co-moderated the WAN/Ifra ‘Beyond the Printed Word’ newspaper conference in Vienna; given Singapore’s annual media lecture (introduced by the audience in its National Library by the President of that Republic), and the initial edition of the now 15-year-old International Journal of New Media Studies, which is based in Asia, lead with my seminal essay, What is New Media.
Although also while consulting had been teaching in Syracuse University’s graduate school between 2007 and 2021, I’ve done so much consulting abroad that, except for some for the U.S. Congress, all of it since 2015 has been abroad. There are two reasons for that. The first is simply that most of the world’s media exists outside the United States. The second is that United States media was the first in the world to pursue the wrong strategy adapting to personal computer-mediated technologies and that nation’s Mass Media industries are now in ruins (most consolidations among major media companies there aren’t due to or lead to successes). I can ably document my strident forewarnings to that. Although Canadian, Western European, and Australian Mass Media industries aren’t in much better shape than their American cousins, they’ve still time to adjust properly and successfully. Basing my consulting work out of Spain rather than Connecticut makes better sense.
I hadn’t however fully anticipated the bureaucracies involved in such a geographic change: proving financial wherewithal, lack of criminal record, birth place and marriage licensing, business records, etc. So, I apologize for stating in May that I must begin regular posting here, then not doing so. I’ll now endeavor to do so.
Know that my consulting business blog is at DigitalDeliverance.com and that my more important New Media blog is at IndividuatedMedia.com. I also have a New Media newsletter via Substack at https://digitaldeliverance.substack.com/publish/home. The VinCrosbie.com blog you’re now reading is for my non-political, non-business postings. Because I’ve already had several people signup for a newsletter here, I plan year to launch a Substack newsletter for this blog later this year.
Where am I now truly located? Peripatetic, that’s all I how to know. I post this from Connecticut but will be in Spain this weekend. Connecticut the following weekend through September. Then Spain, Italy, and Macau, followed by Connecticut in November and Spain in December. Truly, a digital nomad.
The urban portions of the YouTube video above were filmed in our neighborhood at a rooftop cafe my wife and I frequent, the neighborhood in which she was born and grew up.