January 25th, 2009
I’m torn. A twitter can alert us to breaking news at speeds far faster than any newspaper ever could. Yet with its 140-character limit it surely cannot do much more than create an alert and a quick observation. There’s a huge gulf between a twitter and investigative journalism. In a perfect world, Twitter would eventually…
December 24th, 2008
New York City, ever self-fixated, is treating the current downturn in the newspaper and magazine industries as a tragedy affecting mainly itself (oh yes, and a few folks in Chicago and LA), forgetting that this recession spreads far beyond its narrow borders. An article yesterday in Canada’s The Globe & Mail (the rough equivalent of…
December 12th, 2008
Well, I must give kudos to Steve Rubel, “a marketing strategist and blogger …and senior VP in Edelmean’s Me2Revolution practice.” (What would a junior VP do there?) Mr. Rubel, has by my estimate, broken the 100,000 barrier on the number of essentially self-proclaimed experts who have grabbed at some superficial data points and decided that…
December 9th, 2008
Well, let’s start with the pundits’ top projection: ad spending in Brazil will increase by 30% in 2009! Apparently ZenithOptimedia’s analyst doesn’t read The Economist, which noted on November 6, 2008 that “a few months ago, Brazil’s economy was growing at its fastest pace since the mid-1990s, driven by record commodity prices and record credit…
December 3rd, 2008
The last full-time job I had was in the late 1980s at a Toronto-based company called McCutcheon Graphics. It’s where I gained the knowledge that allowed me to later set out on my own as a consultant and publishing industry analyst. The president of the company, John McCutcheon, was a one-of-a-kind businessman (now retired). I…