MBAs in Media Management ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kE8ydFtzD4
Vienna, huh? Hmmm ....

http://www.mediamanagementcenter.org/

Chicago (bleah), but ...

http://www.bnet.fordham.edu/fordham-business-academics/mba-concentrations/communications--media-management/index.htm

New York ... righteous!

http://www.scps.nyu.edu/areas-of-study/film-video-broadcasting/professional-certificates/entertainment-media-management.html

More New York ...

http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/x1030.xml

L.A. ... pretty great ...

http://mcmagrad.siu.edu/inner.php?pageID=100

Southern Illnois ... urrr ....

http://newhouse.syr.edu/prospective/grad/mediaManagement/program.cfm

Syracuse ... not bad ....

Vision interrupted ...

Maybe this is what everyone goes through: Your company lures you in with the promise of training, and the budget and time required to complete it, only to cap you to the point of getting such inadequate, minimal training as to not make almost any difference whatsoever to your skill base.

*sigh* *harrumph* *sigh*

What that actually translates into for me at my job is sneaking around, "training on the sly" when lag times arrive in my 8-5. (Or 8-6, or 8-7 ...) I'm actually trying to get in additional hours of skill, because we're capped at 16 hours of training for any sort of professional conference or training per year.

Huh?

So without holidays, if we worked 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, that's 2080 hours of which 16 are reserved for betterment. Are you kidding me? That works out to be an hour of training every three weeks. If it were my organization, I'd be a little more proactive about pushing my employees through the education turnstile.

Witness the U.S. Department of Labor's first objective in their "Strategic Plan for Fiscal Years 2006 - 2011": Goal 1, "Develop a prepared workforce by providing effective training and support services to new and incumbent workers and supplying high-quality information on the economy and labor market."

Word up, Elaine L. Chao (Secretary of Labor).

Anyhow, I was saving my company mucho dollars by getting myself enrolled in three weeks worth of free art classes, in order to follow through on my previous post about wanting to appreciate and create layout and design more. Well, sorry vision. You can show up, just not on company time ...

Designing the swoon, chillaxin' with inventors

In the process of researching professional conferences to attend, two types have caught my eye: those that instruct attendees on how to fill the need for better information design, and those that declare the need for more thorough infusions between media and technology.

First, most people know about information design, thanks to Edward Tufte; we just usually call them "charts and graphs." Or a visual representation of the data you could've read in body copy, if you're a reader first. An effective chart has the power to embed itself deeper into our subconsious and memory, and believe it or not, can actually create appreciable value, according to one paper on Information Design. *As a slight aside, zero visuals or graphs/charts on the organization's website? Hmmm .... do as I say, ....

While Tufte's San Francisco conference in December looks interesting, I'm going to have to keep searching for something a little more germaine to my visual preferences (and skill set!).

AIGA has a terrific newsletter called Transitions that helps people make the switch from novice to student to professional designer. I think most editors who are serious about creating value in their publications and professions should park it here for a spell and learn how to appreciate--and ideally create--the work designers do that makes us all swoon.

Secondly, fewer people know about--or understand--the future of how intertwined information/content/media will be with its technological tools/applications/systems bearers. I discovered that there is an actual acronym for Information and Communications Technology (ICT) and these guys plan new communications business models around communications networks and devices. And unless you're Albert Bell and William Randolph Hearst, chances are you will rely on the next inventor and his/her invention to deliver your message.


The Economist, interestingly, is hosting a similar conference in October this year, but this time, they're gathering the techies, the editors and the marketers to find out how to make sure companies are at that intersection, just waiting to nab the next surge of consumer traffic. Marketers are positioning themselves to meet the commerce where it will be. Pretty smart, huh?

So why don't writers, editors and publishers get strategic about where to meet their audiences? Could it be we've spent too long ruminating over the importance of our own messages that we've failed to see the inventors and their tools just waiting to help us get to the intersection? And guess who's at the intersection? Our audiences, who by the way, happen to be our customers, buyers of media. Buyers of content. Maybe if we spent a little more time with the inventor crowd, we'd be positioned to capture the next wave of paid-content consumers ...

Experience, report, but filter ...

Sometimes the best thing to say online is not the first.

ABA Journal reminds us as content creators that sometimes the editorial process includes not just fact-checking, but gut-checking, before posting our news, information or editorials.

It also reminds me that while I experience the world and get ready to report my findings, it's good to leave the catharsis to things like the yoga studio, instead of L'Éléfont, n'est-ce pas?

ISTJ, take two??

Unbelievable.

Once again, an ISTJ rating for me. Although actually, it's an ISTJ rating for this blog. I tested its language at Typealyzer, a tool developed to analyze the personality type conveyed in your blog. I can't say I'm stoked about this rating, but what can I say? It's been a hard week. This is what happens to me (see earlier "93 Percent More Agreeable Than Me" post) in trying times.

Additionally, now Typealyzer has ArcheTypealyzer, a tool that shows you what personality archetype your blog conveys. Mine said:

Motivation: Belonging
Desire to be yourself and find out about the world.

OK, now that? I can live with.

Museums of the future: counterpoint

And yet, even as I post the "update" vision below, it strikes me that static text is somewhat staid, grand and soothing. There certainly is a place for the fixed word in our ever-changing dialogue, but it impresses upon me the greater weight that those fixed words must now hold if they want to anchor our histories of great people, places and things with real conviction.

I think I was hoping for better quality and depth of writing on the placards at the de Young. Guess I could've just stated that upfront, but leave it to me to see an opportunity to use a different media model.

Museums of the future: updating the art-content interplay

Recently, I went to the de Young Museum in San Francisco to see the Yves Saint Laurent and Andy Warhol exhibits. I don't think it struck me until days afterward that the two shows were devoted to artists who mainly plied their best crafts through the 1950s through 1970s. It's interesting to think of the 20th century as "modern" in terms of an art museum, when the 21st century has already brought us more information and imagery than we know what to do with.






The actual costumes and posters were soothing to see in real life; their tangibility reinforcing the wall placard's descriptions alongside. But something about the placards themselves drove me nuts: static text? I don't know. I guess had we never been introduced to the Information Age, static text would suit me just fine.

I guess my point was that I couldn't believe how dated the content (or placards) seemed, in light of our culture of information instantaneousness. One cool thing to see if they would do it, would be touchscreen placards that you could flip though to see different critics' takes on the same piece of art or artist.

Part of me started to think about current artists and authors who reign supreme in real time. I'm not sure how this would work, but I began to think about how they could display actual art that is being created as we speak, perhaps on Screen #1, then have actual critics writing the biographies and summaries of the artists and their work, perhaps on Screen #2. It would almost be a wing of the museum where you'd never see the same thing twice, and curators would be responsible for going out in the field and "gathering" these artists and writers, and then assembling their feedback into a living, updating art-content interplay.

I would be highly inspired by this real-time art assembly.

de Young, holla if you hear me.