Mike Urlocker is one of the few people who writes a blog that this site links to. I think Mike is a pretty clever guy.
These days, he is a consultant looking at disruptive effects on business. Recently, he wrote:
A committee structure designed to boost efficiency and effectiveness of the current operations is focussed on the wrong thing. Its like moving the deck chairs on the Titanic. Or worse, arguing about who is in charge of the deck chairs.
The iceberg was in charge of the Titanic. The customers are in charge of the news business. And the customers by and large have spoken: Newspapers are less relevant today than ever. The most important group that newspapers should pay attention to are not their customers. It is the non-customers.
Scott Feschuk recently wrote in Macleans magazine about various discussions at the Banff Television Festival. Fred Fuchs, newly hired as a senior programming executive at the CBC, says that TV shows are subsets of a bigger content experience.
Fuchs told a panel on the future of Canadian television that the public broadcaster will no longer develop TV series without simultaneously working to produce “content experiences” related to the shows that can be deployed on the Internet and on digital platforms. While certainly deeply trendy in its future-savvy parlance, Fuchs’ remarks prompted a minor outbreak of Head Shakes of Disbelief among producers and writers in the audience. Indeed, a wisenheimer might be tempted to suggest that before CBC gets too obsessed with exploiting new media opportunities, it might first want to focus on producing a new show or two that Canadians might actually want to, you know, watch.