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In 1990, I was introduced to Jan Stenbeck, the third wealthiest man in Scandinavia. He was a self-made media billionaire, a Swedish Ted Turner – brilliant, mercurial, iconoclastic. I had spent two years travelling around the world with my...

In 1942, the economist Joseph Schumpeter coined the terms creative destruction. He was describing what happens when inovation radically changes the groundrules of how an industry works. Those who thought they had a monopoly, or a lock on an...

This morning I am listening to NPR’s Weekend Edition. It’s a good way to spend a Sunday morning. In 1990, I was doing the same thing, when it occured to me that NPR could make some pretty good television,...

There is an old expression that says, “necessity is the mother of invention”. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Necessity does not drive invention. Rather, new inventions come along and mess up everyone’s life. They would,...

This morning, I gave the keynote speech to 800 or so broadcasters from both PBS and NPR stations across the country as they kicked off their Media 2007 Conference in Boston. It might seem odd to have both PBS...

Yesterday we spent the day with one of our corporate clients. I don’t want to get into any names here, but suffice it to say they are a major publisher and you would recognize their magazine titles anywhere. It’s ...

I found out the other day that we are finalists for a Knight Foundation Grant for a Citizen Journalism project we have proposed.  We’re keeping our fingers crossed. The notion of ‘Citizen Journalism’ sends conventional television news people into...

We spent most of yesterday screening submissions to a new television series we are producing for Discovery called ‘Show Us Your World’. The concept is derivative of Current.tv, which I did with Al Gore a few years ago. But...

Technology dictates architecture. That is, a specific technology demands a specific architecture. Not the architecture of a building, but rather the architecture for the implementation of that technology.  As lazy humans, however, we get the technology first; the architecture...