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

These pretty much match the 8 lectures of the course. The group assignment will be due around week 4 or 5, and be reviewed in class a week later, the exam takes place in week 10. Outside speakers to be invited for some of these lectures as appropriate.

Network Architecture and Generativity

Technologies of communication, access, and control. 
Tech introduction to web, blogs, wikis, irc, multimedia, games, mobile,…
Generativity: Tech and Content (JZ)

• Jonathan Zittrain, selections from Generativity: The Future of the Internet - And How to Stop It
• John Perry Barlow, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996)
• RFC 1958: Architectural Principles of the Internet
• J.H. Saltzer, D.P. Reed and D.D. Clark, End-to-End Arguments in System Design (1981)
• Sharon Eisner Gillett and Mitchell Kapor, The Self-governing Internet: Coordination by Design
• Lawrence Lessig, What Things Regulate Speech? 38 Jurimetrics 629 (1998)

Making a business viable in the Networked World

Attracting demand; Who pays?
Advertising, data-mining, and other business models
Google AdSense; Acxiom; Claritas; Craigslist; BBC

• 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
• Steve Fishman, The Boy Who Wouldn’t be King, New York Magazine

Branding and letting go of control

Corporate blogging, attitudes toward parodists, interactive advertising
The hazards of over-lawyering (Forbidding EULAs, Baseless threats)

• 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)
• Pork Board sends threats over parody slogan, apologizes. 'Pork Board has a cow over slogan parody'

Trust and Accountability in the online world

Privacy, spam, social networking, “Web 2.0”
e.g. MAPS RBL; SpamHaus; MySpace; Friendster; LinkedIn; yelp

• danah boyd, Friends, Friendsters, and Top 8
• John Grohol, Anonymity and Online Community: Identity Matters
• Ina Steiner, eBay 'Feedback Farms' Planted with One-Cent eBooks, AuctionBytes.com
• Resnick et al, The Value of Reputation on Ebay: A Controlled Experiment

Copyright & technology

Disruptive innovation and the impulse to control it
MP3; YouTube; MythTV; TiVo 
iTunes/PlaysForSure/Zune;

• Wendy Seltzer & Fred von Lohmann, Death by DMCA, IEEE Spectrum, June 2006, < >
• 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)
• Wendy Seltzer, The Broadcast Flag: It’s not just TV, 57 Fed. Comm. L.J. 209 (2005)
• Tim Wu, Copyright's Communications Policy, 103 Mich. L.Rev. 278 (2004)
• EFF, Who Killed TiVo ToGo (2006)

Open source, open licensing of content

New models for information production and dissemination
GNU/Linux; Creative Commons; BBC Creative Archive; Wikipedia
Network economics, standards, and competition (AIM/gAIM/Jabber)

• 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

• Clay Shirky, Ontology is Overrated
• Chris Anderson, The Long Tail, Wired Magazine, October 2004
• Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma (excerpts)
• Varian & Shapiro, Information Rules (excerpts)
• Tim O'Reilly, What is Web 2.0?

Mergers and Acquisitions

Valuation and moving on
Role of regulation in a global environment

• 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.

Books

Essential purchase / course textbook

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

Recommended texts

• 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>

Further recommended reading:

• Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, Yale University Press (2006) and <http://www.benkler.org/wealth_of_networks/index.php/Main_Page>
• Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture, <http://www.free-culture.cc/>
• JD Lasica, Darknet: Hollywood's war against the digital generation, Wiley (2005)
• Clayton Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma, HBS Press (1997)
• John Battelle, The Search, (2005)
• The Cluetrain Manifesto

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)

Class Structure

Classes may have lecture, guest speaker, student presentations, demos, cases,...

• set aside time in classes 2-8 for presentation of in-progress student projects.
• demos of relevant technology, perhaps led by students.
• of 3 hours, max 1hr of straight lecture, usually more discussion