The future of media? Bet on events

Robin Sloan, on generation vs recitation. Lots to think about. A specter is haunt­ing the inter­net, and I think it’s even scarier than the chal­lenge of get­ting peo­ple to pay money. It’s the chal­lenge of get­ting them to pay atten­tion. I think it’s only going to get worse—which is to say, bet­ter, because we as [...]

the price of Twitter

Over at the New Yorker, George Packer has an interesting and important essay about social media and its effects on culture, particularly the news. “Any journalist who cheerleads uncritically for Twitter is essentially asking for his own destruction,” he says. I’m not sure he’s right about that, but there are lots of hidden costs we [...]

writing as vocation

[The following essay was excerpted from a presentation on "Writing as Vocation" at the student media convention sponsored by College Media Advisers in Spring 09, New York City. See related presentation here.] Why do you write? Whatever your answers, they tend to break out along two dimensions: the esthetic and the persuasive. On the esthetic [...]

global learning. really.

Dr. Wayne Clugston, senior vice-president of corporate development with Bridgepoint Education, predicted that by 2020 higher education will be fully engaged in global entrepreneurial learning. By this he means learning will extend far beyond classroom walls, drawing people together in more consumer-driven learning communities. Clugston believes co-constructed learning of this sort is driven by the [...]

rethinking the communications curriculum.

Last March a steamy paperback published by Harper Perennial wasn’t getting much traction in the mainstream press. Juvenile. Sexist. Offensive. So the publisher paid $10,000 to produce three risque’ videos and put them on Youtube, where it spread to Myspace. Two weeks later the book was in its third printing with over one million verified [...]

keeping up with convergence.

an editorial for the Association of Christian Collegiate Media newsletter Journalism is not dead. As Philip Meyer, Knight Chair in Journalism at the University of North Carolina has observed, “Most of the things that I needed to know for my Twentieth Century journalism career I learned in high school, and they are still useful today: [...]