It is often valuable to have a grasp of history when looking to the future.  Too often those that don’t have a historical perspective think that everything is new when in many cases what is new is a refurbished version of a past success model. 

The other day Clear Channel Communications announced that a station it owns in Dallas, KZPS, was going to stop airing 30 and 60 second commercials.  Instead of running lots of commercials, the station will have advertisers sponsor an hour of programming.  During each hour the DJ will spend about two minutes speaking about the sponsor or …

Last week it was announced that Life magazine would cease publication, again. This is the third death of the magazine since it was founded in 1936. Life was a weekly from 1936 to 1972, when it first stopped publication. It was revived as a monthly in 1978 but then shut down again in 2000. It was resurrected as a newspaper insert in 2004 but never really took hold in that iteration which was an incredibly misguided strategy to begin with.

Life was, simply put, the greatest showcase of quality and historically important photographs in the middle part …

This is the second week in a row of attending an important convention in Las Vegas. Last week was the largest consumer electronic convention, CES.  This week a Television convention that is in its forty-fourth year and which, for the past two decades has been very important and influential, NATPE..  Last week a convention about the screens, this week a convention about delivery methods and the content. 

The way forward can bee seen, at least in the realm of media and its consumption and how our lives have changed, by looking at these two conventions.  My thoughts on the CES show …

Ten years ago the word convergence was most often used when predicting the convergence of the television set and the computer. Granted there were things like PDAs that synched up to a computer, but the PDA could go into the pocket and the computer could not.  As we all know, it was the cell phone where convergence first showed up, combining phone, camera and PDA.  Then music was added as was connectivity to the Internet.

In the last year the excitement was the convergence in the home between the computer and the television.  This was accelerated because of the penetration of …