For the past four years, I’ve been teaching a New Media Business for media course at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. It was originally open just to postgraduate students, but a few years ago we opened it to select upperclassmen, too.
Some 250 students have taken the course. Approximately half were from the Newhouse School’s Media Management masters degree program, in which taking the course is a requirement. However the rest of the students have been from the school’s Arts Journalism, Broadcast Journalism, Communications, Graphic Design, Magazine, Newspaper, Photography, Public Diplomacy, Public Relations, and Television/Radio/Film departments. Students and staff from the university’s Whitman School of Business, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, School of Information Studies, University College, and the College of Law also have taken the course. In any semester, between a quarter and a third of the students who take the course are foreign, mainly from China, India, the Middle East, or European Union.
Because New Media technologies, business models, and practices are continually changing, I have to update the course syllabus every semester. Here is the current version, minus university boilerplate:
New Media Business syllabus
ICC625-M001 (55764) & ICC300-M001 (60544)
Spring 2012
Course Goals: Learn the dynamics, economics, and technologies that are reshaping the media industries worldwide during the 21st Century. Learn how these differ from those of 20th Century media. Learn how to adapt to these changing times.
Disclosures: There aren’t sufficient hours in this single course to provide in-depth assessments of all New Media technologies which are constantly evolving.
Moreover, the syllabus you’re reading is subject to change. Each semester a different mix of students from Newhouse departments attends this course. For example, last semester’s course was taken by 18 Media Management, two Broadcast Journalism, one Public Relations, one Advertising, one Newspaper student, and a Whitman staffer. In contrast, this semester’s course currently has five Advertising, one Broadcast Journalism, and one Newspaper student enrolled. So, after the first week of classes each semester, the instructor revises this syllabus to focus on the specific needs of the students in that semester.
Dates, Hours, and Location: Twenty-nine (29) eighty-minute classes will be held between 11:00 a.m. and 12:20 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays from January 17 to May 1, 2012, in the Larry Kramer War Room (#252 in Newhouse 3, geo-coordinates on request).
Agenda & Topics: The following agenda of class topics is tentative. The actual agenda may vary due to availability of speakers or additional topics added during the semester either by the instructor or the requests of students.
The first four weeks of the course surveys the current state of the world’s media; how that situation cannot be explained by classical Mass Media theory, and examines the new theories which fit that situation.
January 17 – Ritual Reading of the Syllabus. Plus, discussion of class goals and policies. Handout: Student questionnaire.
January 19 – Embracing Change. The elasticity of time. The Confederate widow and the World War One Flying Ace anachronisms. How long do you plan to live? People you’ll meet who will in the the 22nd Century. How to adapt to change, and why knowing how to embrace change and adapt to is the paramount skill for 21st Century media people to have.
January 31 and February 2 – Apocalypse. What challenges do the advertising, newspaper, magazine, radio, television, cinema, public relations, photography industries now face? How the ancient Greek word apokálypsis actually means ‘lifting of the veil’, ‘revelation’, and ‘disclosing something hidden in an era dominated by falsehood and misconception’ and not (contrary to popular belief) ‘chaos’ or ‘end of the world’.
February 2 – Creative Disruption. How an Austrian economist strove to become the greatest economist in the world, the best horseman in his nation, and the greatest lover in all of Vienna. How his work in one of those endeavors helps us understand the situation the media industries face.
February 7 – What Ultimately Are Causing the Media Change? Meet Gordon Moore, Martin Cooper, and Gerald Butters. The interactions of what they observed. Will change stop in your lifetime? The clockwork towards technological singularity.
February 9 – What Has Been the Greatest Change in Media History? Are New Media merely traditional forms of media put online or manifestations of something much larger underway? What has been the greatest change in media to occur in human history?
February 14 – Across the Spectrum of Change. How the greatest change in media history affects the practices and businesses models of journalism, entertainment, and information, and even the content of those fields. Why Social Media are manifestations of this change and the ‘tidal shift’ resulting.
February 16 – The Economics of Content and the Contents of Surplus. Why traditional media business models are failing. How supply & demand specifically affects value and attention and value. Why fewer and fewer people will pay for traditional content, and use it less frequently and less thoroughly—no matter if the content is delivered via traditional forms or online. How content must change. How, where, and when to charge for what content?
The next five weeks provide practical information about how to prosper and adapt to changes in various fields and formats of media during the 21st Century.
February 21 – Web 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, and the Internet Timeline. How you only have to remember two things about the geologic timescale of New Media. How a host of people, almost all of them in their twenties, had the courage of their ideas and have changed the world.
February 23 – How Does Digital Work? What Does Interactive Actually Mean? Do TurboTax® or the Intel Turbo Boost® really use turbochargers? Do the words digital and interactive actually have real meanings? Why knowing these meanings can lead media to success.
February 28 –Alphabet Soup: HTTP, CSS, SEO, SEM, XML, and ROI. How the Worldwide Web works. How to measure and improve your use of the Web and other interactive technologies. And why the refrigerator you buy five years after your graduation will know some good recipe for what it contains.
March 1 – What are Individuated Media? Should You Be Permissive or Intrusive? Will Mass Media continue to be the primary way people obtain news, entertainment, and information or will something else replace it?
March 6 & 8 – The Practices and Effectiveness of Online Advertising. Why something with such relatively small response rates is becoming the world’s primary form of advertising. Practices and problems.
March 14 & 16 – Spring Break Week.
March 20 – How New Media Differs Legally from Traditional Media. Technology outrunning the law and governments. COPA, CAN-SPAM, Safe Harbors, Personal Jurisdiction, SOPA, and Net Neutrality
March 22 – The Blogosphere. Does anyone actually earn money blogging? Should you or your company blog? What if everyone else is doing it? The revenge of ‘the people formerly known as the audience.’
March 27 – Going Mobile. Will mobile really change the media industries? What are the ‘G’s, Geolocation, Augmented Reality, and Goggling?
March 29 – Tweets, Check-Ins, Virtual Realities, and Loquacious Devices. The incipient deaths of keyboarding and handwriting. Meet the new intermediaries: Dragons, Siris, and HALs.
The final month of course examines the futures of various industries and provides practical information about how to prosper and adapt to changes in various fields and formats of media during the 21st Century.
April 3 – The Revenge of Paper. How tablet devices are just one of many primordial steps to something that replaces paper. A dress of OLED. Everything becomes a display. What will the book in the future do?
April 5 – The Revenge of Radio. How a medium once thought to be dying has become one of the most popular mobile app. Have you seen the radio station’s video? Individuation in radio. How Pandora teach Individuation, not Mass Media.
April 10 – The Future of Television. Brought to you by Ethernet television and a host of pretenders. The coming implosion of the U.S. television affiliate model. Can your local station survive? No borders except language and culture. Rights, Royalties, and Revanchism.
April 12 – The Future of Cinema. Digital projection to the home big screen versus the bigger screen with strangers at the mall? Had 3D gone flat? A holographic shell game: which of the ‘Peas’ is really there?
April 17 – A Tale of Two Parochial Countries. Who are the largest groups of nationals online? Why you should go abroad virtually before seeing all of the 50 United States. How a country that once led the world in interactive is now ranked in the teens. What you can learn from other nation’s New Media.
April 19 –Business Formation, Partners, and Practices. A primer about how to form a business legally and to deal with partners, investors, co-workers, or employees. How new technologies affect ownership.
April 24 & 26 – A Week of Best Practices from Worldwide. Who said, “Good artists copy, great artists steal”?
May 1 – Course Summary & Evaluations.
Textbooks: There are no required textbooks for this course. No printed textbook is able to keep current with the changes radical underway in the media industry. Besides, this is a New Media course, so the instructor will assign online readings. The instructor can recommend specific books about New Media which students in those specific majors should read.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Newspaperand 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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For the next three weeks, I’ll be lecturing on Digital Media Management at the Sol Plaatje Institute for Media Leadership, at Rhodes University‘s School of Journalism and Media Studies, in Grahamstown, Eastern Cape, South Africa. These lectures will be based upon the New Media Business graduate school course that I teach at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, in the United States.
Here is the syllabus for these lectures:
Monday, 20 April – Embracing Change. The instructor, the syllabus, and what your expectations are in this class. Why the most important skill to the skill to learn new skills. The first book. How Moore’s Law is causing the ever accelerating pace of change. The future is here, but unevenly distributed. The 40 to 100-year cycles of change. Embracing constant change.
Tuesday, 21 April – A World of Serenity & Maelstroms There is no Single Way Worldwide. The Only Borders are Language and Culture. Lands of temperate construction. Lands of Creative Destruction. Where the Epicenters are. Media in Crisis. The Epic video. Why some countries’ newspaper industries are collapsing. Why some countries’ broadcast industries are about to implode. How the cinema industry will change. The Pit of Active Inertia. The ‘Muddle Through’ Morass. If You Have to Think Outside the Box, the Box is the Problem.
Thursday, 23 April – What has been the Single Greatest Change in Media during the Past 400 Years? How scarcity turned to surplus and is ending the Mass Media era. What Makes Individuals? The gravitation of Consumers. The myth of Fragmentation. How control shifts out of the hands of publishers and broadcasters and becomes shared with consumers. How supply & demand affects media management: How it affects the price of news and information. Why information doesn’t necessarily want to be free. How it affects scheduling. How it redefines local. What are Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, and Web 3.0 or the Semantic Web, and why each is significant?
Friday, 24 April –– What do Digital, Interactive, and New Media Mean? Why the true definitions of these terms matter in a world of hype. What is digital and how do its technologies work? What is interactive and how does it work? What characteristics and capabilities make these different than traditional forms of media? What is or are New Media? Is there a New Medium? The four common characteristics of successful New Media business plans: ‘Bits not atoms.’ Digital addressability. Quantum shift in control over media. Why Open systems triumph over Proprietary systems.
Tuesday, 28 April – How Do New Media Differ Legally and Economically from Traditional Media? How laws governing publishing, broadcasting, marketing, and advertising in New Media differ from those governing traditional media: COPA, SPAM, spyware. cybersquatting, copyrights and royalties, digital rights management, personal and foreign jurisdictions, ‘Safe Harbors’, etc. The conflations of daily and monthly users. Behaviorals versus Demographics. Why it takes 50 to 100 online users to make up for the revenue lost losing one traditional media user. The economics of scarcity versus the economics of surplus. Permission Marketing. Personalization and its technologies. What will people pay for online content, when, and why? The three criteria for successful pricing of information online.
Wednesday, 29 April — Website Don’t Deliver. How the Internet works. HTML and CSS. Web servers and server logs. Clickstreams and metrics. Web analytics. Electronic mail publishing/marketing. Really Simply Syndication. The gaps in the world’s most accountable form of media.
Thursday, 30 April — Online Advertising. The brief history of online advertising. ‘Rich media’ online ads. clickthroughs. Landing pages and microsites. Targeting by demographics, context, behavior, geography, affinity, or purchases. Dayparting. Online Advertising Networks. Phorm.‘Dutch auctions’ and Google. Costs per Thousand (CPM) versus Costs per Clickthrough versus Costs per Action.
Monday, 4 May– Electronic Paper and Social Media. PDFs and digital editions. Remote printing. Electronic paper, Kindles, OLEDs, and digital presses. How to publish, manage, market, and advertise on chat boards, blogs, MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, virtual worlds, and other current or future forms of Social Media.
Tuesday, 5 May– Radio, Television, and Cinema Go Online. Webcasting, podcasting, vodcasting, peer-to-Peer, BitTorrent, Hulu, and YouTube. Why Blue-Ray’s victory over HD DVD will be moot.
Wednesday, 6 May – Search Engine Optimization/Search Engine Marketing. The roles of search engines online. Why more than half of all online advertising today is about search engine marketing. How does search engine optimization work? How does search engine marketing work?
Thursday, 7 May – The Mobile World. Publishing or broadcasting to mobile phones, Playstations, iPhones, and other mobile devices. WiFi, WiMax, 2.5G, 3G, 4G, and 5G. , New forms of broadcast that are unique to New Media. A world of ambient information.
Friday, 8 May: 9am-12.39pm – The Resolution of New and Traditional Media What is XML, Exif, NewsML, AdML. Open Source or Closed Sources? Mashups? How and why metadata controls content distribution in the 21st Century? Editorial workflows in the 21st Century.
I’ve a list of readings and assignments for each lecture, but keep those proprietary.
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Ryan Scholin guest-lecturing in my New Media Business class at Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communicatinos
My biweekly Digital Publishing column at ClickZ.com is about the skills that journalism schools need to teach their students to prepare them for this century. The advice in it is true for retraining professional journalists, too.
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In May, when after a year of teaching graduate school courses, I wrote a ClickZ.com column lamenting how resistant to change many media schools are about New Media, I was amused when my friend Jeff Jarvis tried to hijack my column and turn it into an advertisement for his smaller and competing school.
“Reading Vin Crosbie’s piece about the resistance to change and general obstructionism he has found teaching at journalism school (he doesn’t say it, but he has spent the year at the Newhouse School at Syracuse University), it makes me triply glad I am teaching at CUNY [City University of New York] Graduate School of Journalism. This will come off as blatant self-promotion for the school but so be it….When I arrived at CUNY, I feared I would find what Vin did. But I haven’t, not at all. I thought I might be marginalized as the crazy guy. But that hasn’t happened….Instead, in the last few months, I’ve been teaching the faculty itself in all the tools of online: blogs, wikis, RSS, video, SEO, and on and on. The best part of this has not been my colleagues’ receptivity to, curiosity about, and eagerness to adapt the tools themselves in their classes but the discussion we have shared about the impact of these tools on journalism and education. We’ve had rich back and forth on the new architecture of media and news that the impact of this change on journalism education.”
Reading that, I felt like an American does when he reads a Hungarian or Malaysian write, ‘Look at all the trouble the U.S. economy is in! Come start your new business in my country, whose economy is growing.’
Well, much as I love Budapest and Kuala Lumpur and congratulate their countries about their economy’s growth, I’d much rather be working here in the United States. Indeed, when my one-year contract to teach graduate school courses at Syracuse University expired a week after I wrote my column and that university offered to renew it, I did so without hesitation, despite offers from other media schools.
There might be some old-fashioned professors, including a few obstructionists, in my school, as there are at most schools, but I’d rather help navigate a supercarrier with its awesome firepower, than serve in the navy of a smaller country of lesser prowess. When I recently read about Arizona State University receiving a $552,000 grant “to create an incubator where students will learn how to create and launch digital media products,” I had a similar feeling as I sat in my office within Syracuse University’s 72,000 square-foot, $32.5 million dollar Newhouse III building, which is devoted to New Media.
With all due respect to Jeff and his school, I was miffed about seeing my column hijacked into an ad for another school. I’ve been meaning to respond. Had I known someone would use what I wrote to tout another school, I would have balanced the disadvantages I mentioned by also mentioning my school’s overwhelming advantages.
Jeff is improving CUNY. As he has written, he’s teaching his school’s faculty how to use blogs, wikis, RSS, video, SEO, and Twitter. We’re doing that here at Syracuse, too. Moreover, the other New Media professors and I have begun cross-training Syracuse faculty, whose ranks number several times larger the size of those at other media school. We’ve begun teaching photography, audio, and video to the professors in the newspaper, magazine, advertising, and public relations departments, and also teaching all of the schools’ professors how to build and operate Web sites (including Dreamweaver and XML), nonetheless to use RSS, blogware, etc. Our efforts are helped by having all three Newhouse School buildings networked with 25 miles of 100-gigabyte Ethernet onto a 72-terabyte server array. Our supercarrier has nuclear propulsion.
At Syracuse, we’ve also been lucky to have some wonderful guest speakers in the school. Sports broadcaster Bob Costas was in today, as was ESPN’s Mike Turico last week. I want my New Media Business students to listen in particular to Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide CEO Kevin Roberts and Optimedia CEO Antony Young, who each will be here next month. Last semester, I had Rob Curley, Bob Cauthorn, and Rafat Ali each meet with my New Media Business class.
Those are only some of the reasons why I’m now in my second academic year of teaching at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications.
Last year, I taught New Media Business as two weekly classes over 15 weeks, a total of 28 classes not counting mid-term and final exams. This year, because of the school’s class scheduling and my classroom preference, I’m teaching it as 14 once per week classes. So, the course’s syllabus can vary semester by semester. However, here is what I’m teaching this semester:
August 27 – Course Introduction and Syllabus. Discuss the students’ expectations and the instructor’s requirements for the course, grading, assignments, papers or projects, and the syllabus.
The Internet Timeline: A brief history of the Internet, its parts, who invented it, and how it works. What are ‘Web 1.0′ and ‘Web 2.0′? Why each is significant.
September 3 – Digital and Interactive. Why the true definitions of these terms matter in a world of hype. What is digital and how do its technologies work? What characteristics and capabilities make it different than traditional forms of media? What is interactive?
What is/are New Media? The Theories of New Media. Is it anything that is put online? Is it only things that are not associated with traditional media? What new dimensions, if any, does it give to media? The four common characteristics of successful New Media business plans: ‘Bits not atoms.’ Digital addressability. Quantum shift in control over media. How Open triumphs over Proprietary systems.
September 10 – Creative Destruction in the media industry. What are the long-term trends? How to discern between fads and trends? Why the daily newspaper industry is collapsing. Why the television affiliate networks will destruct. Why radio is in crisis? Media ‘train wrecks’ and ‘mine fields.’
A World Tour: Cultural and Geographic Variations in New Media. What can be learned by studying New Media outside of the United States? Who has the best Web sites in the world and why? Who has the best mobile media and why? Who most uses which parts of the Internet, where, and why?
September 17 – How Do the Economics of and Laws about New Media Differ from Traditional Media: The economics of scarcity versus the economics of surplus. Finite ad inventory versus infinite ad inventory. the costs of streaming versus the costs of broadcasting. COPA. CAN-SPAM. Legal jurisdiction. Digital Mellennium Copyright Act, Webcast royalties. DRM. US vs. EU ‘Safe harbors.’ Etc.
September 24 – Alphabet Soup, Metadata, and ‘Web 3.0.’ SGML, HTML, CSS, XML, Exif, NewsML, AdML. How XML lets machines talk to each other. The Semantic Web and content distribution in the 21st Century.
October 1 – Paid Content, Permission, & Personalization: Why information doesn’t necessarily want to be free.What will people pay for online content, when, and why? The three criteria. Individualization/Personalization of content and advertising. Permission Marketing.
October 8 – Social Media & Virtual Words: How to publish, broadcast, market, advertise, and handle chat boards, blogs, MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, twitter, Second Life, virtual worlds, and other current or future forms of Social Media.
October 15 – Streaming Media: Webcasting, podcasting, vodcasting, peer-to-Peer, BitTorrent, YouTube, why Blue-Ray’s victory over HD DVD will be moot, and an examination of new forms of broadcast that are unique to New Media.
October 22 – Metrics & RSS: Server logs, clickstreams, analytics, Phorms, Really Simply Syndication, and the gaps in the world’s most accountable form of media.
October 29 – Search Engines & Optimization: Why more than half of all online advertising today is about search engine marketing. How does search engine marketing work? How to optimize content for search engines?
November 5 – Banners & ‘Rich Media’ Advertising: The history of online advertising. Clickthroughs. Targeting by demographics, context, behaviors, geography, affinity, or purchases. Dayparting. What is ‘Rich Media’ advertising.
November 12 – E-Mail Marketing: Why electronic mail is still the ‘killer application’ despite Spam. How e-mail publishing/marketing works and its metrics?
November 19 – Mobile, E-Paper, Print, and the Future: Publishing or broadcasting to mobile phones, Playstations, iPhones, and other mobile devices. WiFi, WiMax, 2.5G, 3G, 4G, and 5G. PDF Editions, electronic paper, Kindles, OLEDs, and digital presses. A world of ambient information.
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