Those of us in the media are agonizing about the future of media. Many of us don’t have jobs. Many companies are looking at circulation, advertising, profits (such as they are) slide down and down. Many of us feel that we’re clinging to a life raft as it comes apart.
And we’re not the only ones. Media is now a very porous term, meaningless by some people’s reckoning. When anyone can be a publisher or a broadcaster, the disappearance of the middle man means a whole new future that will look totally different from the past.
We are all floundering through the present trying to, as David Carr, Media Equation columnist for the New York Times says, “trying to find a throughline.”
As part of that search, Imagination is going to publish a multi-media book over the course of the next how ever many months it takes. The first installment went live this morning. The book’s (vook’s) title was inspired by a column of Carr’s where he said that we are not sinking but rising, in fact, on “a fresh, ferocious wave.”
We want to see what that wave will look like, who will ride it successfully and how all of this might get paid for. Our monthly series called Making It Pay will cover the search for new business models.
We hope to make this as interactive as possible and involve as many people, as many ideas, as many searches and searchers as we can find.
Please join the conversation and debate we hope to inspire.
