Launch of Newspaper Extinction Timeline for every country in the world

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[UPDATE December 20, 2017: Read a review of the Newspaper Extinction Timeline 7 years after it was published]
Back in August [2010] I predicted that newspapers in their current form will be irrelevant in Australia in 2022. That received significant international attention including from The Australian, The Guardian, Editor & Publisher (which called me the ‘Wizard of Aussie’) and many others.

Part of the point I wanted to make was that this date is different for every country. As such I have created a Newspaper Extinction Timeline that maps out the wide diversity in how quickly we can expect newspapers to remain significant around the world. First out is USA in 2017, followed by UK and Iceland in 2019 and Canada and Norway in 2020. In many countries newspapers will survive the year 2040.

The Australian has again covered this in a story title Deadline for newspapers as digital publications rise. There may be some more coverage in coming days.

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Click on image to download full framework

The second page of the framework explains both the global and national drivers leading to the wide disparity in how quickly newspapers will move on, and provides some notes to the framework.

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Keynote on the Future of Global Media in New York

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After Future of Crowdsourcing Summit in San Francisco next week I will be heading on to New York, where among other things I will be at the Ketchum Global Media Network meeting where I will do the keynote and participate in a panel on the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) media landscapes.

Here is the description of my keynote:

The Future of Global Media

Until now media markets have been fairly similar across nations. Today we are seeing a massive divergence in media structures around the world. While some fundamental drivers of change such as social networks and the extraordinary rise of mobile media are prominent everywhere, these and other forces are playing out very differently across East and West, old and new economies. Across all markets, the structures for how news and content are created and become visible are rapidly evolving. The implications for corporate marketers include new perspectives on global campaigns, and the potential to tap into a vast lattice of existing and new channels to reach customers.

And here are full details on the event (also see the event website)

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Looking for Amazing Multi-Talented Content Project Manager/ Editor/ Web Dev – Part-time – Sydney

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Things are crazy busy here, with lots of great stuff on the boil. While our businesses have always been primarily about content, we are starting to make some of these activities more scaleable. As such we’re looking for someone to help us on that journey.

Below is the ad on Seek.com. If you can think of anyone who would be perfect for the role and interested in this, please let them know!

Amazing Multi-Talented Content Project Manager/ Editor/ Web Dev – Part-time – Sydney

Apply your awesome talent and intelligence to cutting-edge highly visible content projects: reports, web, iPad, events and more: part-time/ flexible

• We are looking for someone extremely talented at content creation and projects

• Drive cutting-edge content projects with global visibility

• Working on reports, online media, iPad apps, and/ or software dev – whatever you’re best at

• Based in Sydney’s digital hub Surry Hills – part-time and highly flexible hours

We want talent!

We believe in talent. We want someone exceptional. Rather than a particular skill set, we are looking for a very special person who has outstanding capabilities at language, technology, and ideas, can run effective projects, and add a lot of value to what we do.

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Looking for an outstanding writer/ blogger on crowdsourcing

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For the next 10 days we need writers to help write interesting blog posts for the website of the upcoming Future of Crowdsourcing Summit.

We are only looking for outstanding writers, who can write extremely well and who really understand crowdsourcing, global business, and the web space. This is intended for people who love the crowdsourcing space and want to write about it rather than professional writers/ bloggers.

We are running this project on Odesk – here is the full job description for Outstanding writer/ blogger on crowdsourcing. Please bid on Odesk giving an hourly rate.

If you are the right candidate, we will want at least one blog post a day from you for the next 10 days.

We want people to write in their own name – this is a fabulous way to build on your existing reputation as a great commentator. The blog is going to get a lot of high-level exposure.

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Why Crowdsourcing is the future of EVERYTHING (including 12 key areas (with just 3 exceptions))

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The theme of Future of Crowdsourcing Summit, coming up soon in San Francisco and Sydney, is how crowdsourcing (applying the minds of many) is the future of everything.

It’s a big claim, though to be frank I can’t think of many things it’s not the future of. Anything of human creation, which is most of what we know, has in some ways a crowdsourced future. There are probably three categories of things that will NOT be fundamentally shaped by crowdsourcing:

* Things in our environment that humans don’t impact (possibly volcanic activity and asteroid impact, though even those might not be immune)

* Individual creativity (important but historically overrated to an extraordinary degree)

* Aspects of our humanity that are intrinsic and we do not shape (sex (perhaps) and actually not much else given our increasing powers over our genetic destiny)

Let’s look at some of the things that crowdsourcing most definitely will shape:

Work. Unquestionably work of all kinds is being rapidly distributed across organizational and national boundaries and increasingly broken down into components with structures suitable for crowds to address. The nature of work for many individuals is likely to change dramatically in coming decades.

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A fantastic success story in local TV, newspaper and web: aggregating audiences and linking to transactions

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Next week I am giving the opening keynote at the Regional TV Marketing Association conference in Byron Bay, which brings together the top executives across regional television, media buyers, and corporate marketing roles.

I’ll share more on what I cover when I get a chance (not for a few weeks probably), but I thought it was worth sharing one of the standout case studies of success in local media, including TV and newspapers.

This has been driven by Clark Gilbert, who has famously come from being a professor at Harvard Business School to running a media company in Utah, the heart of Mormon country. The results so far have been exceptional, including 20% growth in the Deseret News newspaper in 2009, the highest in the US. This interview with Gilbert brings out some deep insights, making it well worth watching.

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Why this year Crowdsourcing is the topic of our Future Summit Series in San Francisco and Sydney

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I’ve been remiss in not yet mentioning Future of Crowdsourcing Summit on my blog, so here is a bit of background to the event. Full details are on the Summit website with an overview in the flyer below.

Future of Crowdsourcing Summit 2010

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Conversation on the future of books and publishing

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I am at a lunch organized by book publisher Blurb with Robin Goldberg, SVP of global channels at the company and a variety of authors, journalists and photographers. Blurb’s focus is on personal self-expression such as photography, travel journals, wedding books and so on, so they largely print on hardcover in full color. Blurb has been running for four years and did $45 million in sales last year.

One of the interesting differences between Blurb and some of the other print-on-demand suppliers is that Blurb doesn’t take any cut from the markup that authors choose to put on the sales price of the book.

Below are some of the many discussion topics at the lunch (some with my own thoughts and perspective inject), in no particular order.

  • Does anyone read purely on digital devices any more? One person at the lunch, Stilgherrian, says he rarely reads on paper, and he intends to get rid of any books he hasn’t touched in the last six months. Some others in the group are rarely buying books. I am rapidly shifting to buying e-books though I expect I will still buy some physical books. We’ll see.

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Six steps to success in a world driven by cloud computing

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I recently gave the keynote for an event series on cloud computing run by Telstra Business across five Australian cities. My keynote was followed by a presentation by Telstra’s Chief Technology Officer Hugh Bradlow.

In the current issue of Telstra’s customer magazine Business Insights the feature article is based on Hugh and myself. The article is here, with the full text of my quoted ‘Six Steps to Success’ is below.

Cloud computing: Interview with Ross Dawson and Hugh Bradlow

SIX STEPS TO SUCCESS

For businesses, the challenge is understanding the new technology and realising they’ll have to make significant shifts in the way they think and work to take full advantage of it all. Ross Dawson describes this process in his six steps to success, which covers everything from more flexible approaches to working, to new technology strategies.

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Getting an online identity from before you are born is just the beginning of a life online

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The invention of the graphical web browser in 1993 was the moment that ‘getting online’ became meaningful, when we could start to post ideas, photos, and more that anyone in the world with an internet connection could access. However you needed a certain amount of tech knowledge to do that, and it was only from around 2000 that it began to get easy for anyone to blog, post images, share personal media among friends, and a little while after that to upload videos for the world to see.

Those born in the last five years, in this era of ready online sharing, have rapidly gained online identities, sometimes pretty much at the same time as their parents. Internet security firm AVG has done a survey showing how quickly these images are posted to the world.

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