Draft syllabus

Media Strategies for a Networked World

The Internet has changed the business of media. Citizen journalists write accounts that challenge print journalism; Craigslist and Google compete with magazines as advertising outlets; YouTube offers more personalized “channels” than satellite broadcasters can hope to provide; real world businesses open outlets in SecondLife. As electronic networks become faster, consumers are becoming creators of all forms of content and new business opportunities develop where old ones fall away.

This course aims to familiarize students with the technologies of new media to enhance their perspectives on the global business, ethical and regulatory challenges and to consider the effect new technologies are having on business strategy and operations.

Students will experiment with media including audio, video, blogging, wikis, and multimedia gaming, putting context to theoretical readings and guest lectures from leaders in the field. The assessments will give realistic practice in the type of strategic issues students will face in existing media companies, entrepreneurial start ups and any organization interested in communication. The course requires no technical background.

Syllabus

Network architecture

Technologies of communication, access, and control. Tech introduction to web, blogs, wikis, irc, multimedia, games, mobile,…

• RFC 1958: Architectural Principles of the Internet, <http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1958.txt>
• J.H. Saltzer, D.P. Reed and D.D. Clark, End-to-End Arguments in System Design (1981), <http://web.mit.edu/Saltzer/www/publications/endtoend/endtoend.pdf>
• Jonathan Zittrain, Internet Points of Control, 44 B.C.L.Rev. 653 (2003), <http://cyber.harvard.edu/works/lessig/what_things.pdf>
• Sharon Eisner Gillett and Mitchell Kapor, The Self-governing Internet: Coordination by Design, <http://ccs.mit.edu/papers/CCSWP197/CCSWP197.html>
• Lawrence Lessig, What Things Regulate Speech? 38 Jurimetrics 629 (1998) <http://cyber.harvard.edu/works/lessig/what_things.pdf>

Making a business viable in the Networked World

• Attracting demand
• Measures of success – for the bank, funders, acquirers, customers, workers
• Old and new models for media companies
• Funding new media strategies
• Transitioning old media to the new networked world – Case study of The Guardian newspaper
• Organizing for success

Reading:

• Annet Aris and Jacques Bughin: Managing Media Companies ch 7 & 8
• “The Boy Who Wouldn’t be King” by Steve Fishman – New York Magazine, <www.newyorkmagazine.com/nymetro/news/media/features/14302/>
• (Who pays? )
• Advertising, data-mining, and other business models
• Google AdSense; Acxiom; Claritas; Craigslist; BBC

Branding and letting go of control

Corporate blogging, attitudes toward parodists, interactive advertising Sun and Microsoft corporate blogs; ChillingEffects.org Subservient Chicken Second Life in-game brands The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual (1999), online at <http://www.cluetrain.com/book/index.html> (excerpts?)

Trust in the social networking world

Privacy, spam, social networking, “Web 2.0” MAPS RBL; SpamHaus MySpace; Friendster; LinkedIn; yelp Blogs; YouTube Arctic Monkeys example danah boyd, Friends, Friendsters, and Top 8, <http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_12/boyd/index.html> [FURTHER READINGS]

Copyright & technology

Disruptive innovation and the impulse to control it MP3; YouTube; MythTV; TiVo

• Wendy Seltzer & Fred von Lohmann, Death by DMCA, IEEE Spectrum, June 2006, < http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/print/3673>
• Dean Marks and Bruce Turnbull, Technical Protection Measures: The intersection of technology, law and commercial licenses, 46 J. Copyright Soc'y U.S. 563 (1999), *http://www.wipo.org/documents/en/meetings/1999/wct_wppt/doc/imp99_3.doc
• Wendy Seltzer, The Broadcast Flag: It’s not just TV, 57 Fed. Comm. L.J. 209 (2005), <http://www.law.indiana.edu/fclj/pubs/v57/no2/Seltzer.pdf>
• Tim Wu, Copyright's Communications Policy, 103 Mich. L.Rev. 278 (2004)
• EFF, Who Killed TiVo ToGo (2006), <http://www.eff.org/IP/pnp/eff_cablewp.pdf>

Open source, open licensing of content

New models for information production and dissemination GNU/Linux; Creative Commons; BBC Creative Archive; Wikipedia

• Yochai Benkler, Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm, 112 Yale L.J. (2002)
• Jessica Litman, Sharing and Stealing, 26 Comm/Ent 1 (2004)
• Jonathan Zittrain, The Generative Internet, 119 Harv. L. Rev. 1974 (2006)

Coping with abundance

Community sourcing, collaborative filtering, the “long tail” Amazon recommendations Last.fm; Pandora.com Red Hat; IBM Linux; Microsoft

• Chris Anderson, The Long Tail, Wired Magazine, October 2004, <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html>
• Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma (excerpts)

Mergers and Acquisitions

Theoretical and practical methods of valuation – past, present and future Case studies of recent M&A deals Preparing your company for sale Guest lecturer: Kit van Tulleken, the van Tulleken Co.

Media ownership and public interest Role of regulation in a global environment Ownership and censorship Network economics, standards, and competition AIM/gAIM/Jabber; iTunes/PlaysForSure/Zune;

Books

Essential purchase / course textbook

Annet Aris and Jacques Bughin: Managing Media Companies John Wiley 0-470-01563-2

Recommended textbooks

• Paul Levinson: Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium Routledge 0-415-24991-0

• Nicholas Negroponte: Being Digital

Coronet Books 0340649305

• Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian, Information Rules: A strategic guide to the network economy

HBS Press (1999)

• Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation

MIT Press (2005) and <http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/democ1.htm>

Assessment and practical work

The course aims to give participants a practical, hands-on appreciation of new media and to share experiences with the class first in an open, unassessed way and later as part of the assessment.

Familiarisation: at the beginning of the course, the class will create wikis and blogs working in small groups – these will be discussed in class but will not be formally assessed

Group assessment: working in small groups, selected by the tutors, participants will develop a new media product, service or idea for a proposed or existing organization (worth 40% of the total grade)

Exam: the course will finish with a written exam

• 2 hours
• Worth 60% of the total grade
• Section A: answer 5 questions from a choice of 7 (worth 30% of the total grade)
• Section B: answer 1 question from a choice of 4 (worth 30% of the total grade)