Forget about the transition from print to digital – the real switch is from bound to unbound.

This post was originally going to be a lot longer. It was going to be a philosophical, abstract, quasi academic screed on the differences between bound and unbound media. I shit-canned that post.
This post, the one you are now reading, is going to be short and sweet and to the point.
If [...]

Magazine publishers need to think less about form and more about flow

Ok, so Flyp is pretty… I guess. That is, it’s pretty in a digital edition, lets throw some bells, whistles and Flash at them kind of way.

Still, if this is the future of magazine publishing the industry may be in some serious shit. If we can’t get beyond this destination mentality, this egocentric [...]

It’s a free concert from now on: Woodstock as media allegory

At some point on Friday, August 15, 1969 it became overwhelmingly clear to the promoters of the Woodstock Arts and Music Festival that they were being overrun. The tide of enthusiasm, the groundswell, was growing out of control. It was an emergent, organic, spontaneous overflow of a social stream that had been brimming for [...]

Newspaperman and the Drunken Slumber

The bottom line in this whole mess is that the owners of most newspapers fell asleep. As the world continued to spin, life continued to evolve, and technology continued to advance, the hero of our story – Newspaperman – feel into a deep, ad revenue induced sleep. It was a pleasant dream filled drunken fairy tale of a slumber – the kind you never want to end.

An analogy involving food, news, and your mother

The more I thought on these questions the more the phrase “spoon-fed” stood out – it made me think of my one year old. And then I realized – that’s were we’ve been. In the twentieth century news and media model we were all infants, happily eating up whatever mamma (the press) fed to us. We didn’t care – we didn’t know any better. Strained peas was all we knew.

This band makes me want to write poetry again

I used to write poetry. I saw the world in metaphor. I spent late nights into early mornings pushing a pen fitfully along ruled lines. I filled corners of open time with random phrases. I turned smiles into ink.
Somewhere along the way I lost that. Somewhere along the way life became economic. Somewhere along the [...]

Xark!: The newspaper suicide pact

Multinational monster banks are dying – peer to peer micro lending and local currency exchange is growing. Centralized auto manufacturing is dying – a better place and useful mass transit is coming. Factory farms are creating viruses and nutritionally bankrupt foodstuffs – backyard victory gardens and local farmers markets are restoring health.

And, thankfully, Newspapers are dying – Newsgroups are forming.

A Model for the Magazine Industry

This new tack is going to require some rather intense restructuring as clients will now require more than just a sales contact. Account support will need to be enhanced, creative teams will need to be built, production and design will need to be re-imagined. This is not your father’s magazine workflow.

Fat, drunk, and demonizing blogs is no way to go through life, son.

What am I getting at? Your relentless drive to discredit and demonize the Freshman: the blogs. Not only is it mean spirited it just demeans you. You’re better than that. Sure it’s fun and easy to pick on them – they’re awkward, they make mistakes, they can’t get girls – but you were there once yourself. And guess what? At the rate you’re going – and with the kind of smarts these new kids have – you’ll be working for them in a few short years.

Things Fall Apart: Edge Economics And Crisis

This time around things are different. There are undercurrents and shifts in the very nature of the economy that make it unlikely that this storm can simply be waited out. Institutions that grew strong on the centralized, master-servant, control oriented industrial model are being destroyed by a rapid shift to a decentralized, networked, peer oriented social technology model. We are speedily moving away from an economy dominated by a small group of big companies to one dominated by a big group of small companies.