Transition, transformation, disruption, disintermediation… whichever word you prefer, the publishing industry is undergoing a massive shift that’s being driven by the Internet, with the news and magazine sides arguably a bit further ahead of the curve than the book side, for better or worse, though few major players among them are seeing any light at [...]
In the pre-digital days, influential media brands like Cosmopolitan and Vogue were one of the primary gateways for marketers to connect with consumers. They offered an attentive audience that would have been difficult for most marketers to gather without investing heavily in staff and infrastructure. Today, those media brands are no longer primary gateways, and marketers aren’t nearly as reliant on them to reach their desired audience as they used to be as they now have cost-effective tools at their disposal to engage directly with consumers.
In backing down, I suspect Jobs saw the HTML5 on the wall and realized he was fighting a rare losing battle, playing hardball with major content producers whose early, enthusiastic and unabated promotion of the iPad — as inherently a consumption device as has ever been conceived — helped demonstrate its value to consumers. It was, theoretically, a mutually beneficial relationship until his reach finally exceeded his grasp.
“Just do it!” was definitely an underlying theme of the day as the deceptively sexy notion of the “democratization” of content creation and distribution was frequently noted, but I realized towards the end of the day, what was missing was any reference to the issue of access, and the ever-widening digital divide.
And now blogging is — and very shortly became — something people do do because they are ambitious.
When all is said and done, one of my personal highlights from 2010 will undoubtedly be the “Why Keep Blogging?” panel I participated on at SXSW, [...]
Read My Reviews
Recent Posts
- 5 Career Tips to Survive Publishing’s Digital Shift
- The Myth of “Verticalization” – Community Ain’t Easy
- My Favorite Reads of 2011
- Spinning Dominoes: Don’t Believe the Hype… But DO Learn From It
- Entry Points, Accessibility and Transmedia Potential
- 6Qs: Alex de Campi, Comics Innovator and Provocateur
- Richard Nash on Cursor and the “F” Word
- The Problem With Klout? It Has None
- The Truth About Disruption in Publishing
- Amazon, Libraries and Ownership in the Digital Age
Super Search











