We will have our third edition of the INNOVATION seminars on What’s Next: The New Media Landscape on October 24, 2008, at the Harvard University Faculty Club.
In this and the next posts I will present the highlights and news behind the news of this unique meeting.
But let me start with a little history of these seminars.
In 1993 we had the first one.
A few days before, The New York Times bought the Boston Globe for one billion dollars.
I was then working at the Harvard University Program on Information Resources Policy (PIRP), thanks to Ben Compaine who used to be the executive director of this great think tank.
Ben and his colleagues at the PIRP were reviewing strategic plans and advised corporate and government policymakers from 100 plus affiliates that included Times Mirror Co., Knight-Ridder, Dow Jones, Gannett Co., New York Times Co., AT&T, MCI, Bell Atlantic, Ameritech, IBM, US West, Pacific Telesis, Sprint.
In 1993 the program was headed by Anthony Oettinger a brilliant mind and manager.
The idea for the What’s Next: The New Media Landscape Seminar was to have a two-day meeting with some of the Harvard and MIT Media Lab Faculty and some INNOVATION clients.
During those months at Harvard, I also met Vincent Giuliano, a former executive director of Times Mirror Electronic Publishing and Arthur De Liitle consultant who was writing a fascinating paper about the future of newspapers.
Vincent, the son of an Italian newspaper publisher in Michigan, had worked also for Lexis and Nexis and he introduced me to Jerome (”Jerry”) Rubin, a legendary New York lawyer, former CEO of these data banks, who at the time was serving as the Chairman of the Future of the News Project at the MIT Media Lab.
I met Jerry one night for dinner at the Pudding, the oldest Harvard club, and like Ben or Vincent, we shared the same ideas about the future of the news industry.
Two young Spanish journalists in Boston that summer, Javier Garcia Sayes and Juan Corrales, were fully devoted to the idea of the seminar.
I contacted my colleagues at INNOVATION, and the seminar became a reality in a few weeks.
We invited some of our international clients and the seminar was held at the Harvard University Club on September 2003.
More than 35 media owners, presidents, publishers and editors from 12 countries came to Cambridge, and for many of them this was the first time that they heard about the Internet, the online revolution and the new electronic extensions of the print media.
Keep in mind that 15 year ago Yahoo!, Google, BlackBerry, Amazon, iPod, Facebook, MySpace or Craiglist didn’t exist.
There were no blogs.
No more than 300 servers were available around the world.
Only two years after, in 1995, the San Jose Mercury News was the first newspaper to launch an edition on the World Wide Web.
And one year later, in 1996, The New York Times started its first Web site two blocks away from the New York Times building in Times Square.
In 2004, one year before we had our second What’s Next Seminar, the market value of Yahoo! and Google surpassed The New York Times, Dow Jones, Gannett, Knight Ridder and Tribune together.
What a ride!
What a media revolution!
If you want more information about the full program and registration for our October 24 Seminar, please write us at harvard@innovation-mediaconsulting.com
(A great picture by Eileansiar/Flickr)
