The Only Sane Response to Change

So much of what happens in my business – journalism – is people are now lamenting the change that is occurring.  Well there is not much you can do about it.  The only sane response to change is to find the opportunity in it.  So I tell students to look for that opportunity and sometimes you’re looking for vulnerability in legacy players.  Sometimes you’re looking for new opportunities that are brought on by technology.  

The other thing I think is important is that we’re just at the bare beginning of this momentous change.  I think we tend to think of the change we’re undergoing as happening at a very rapid pace, but I’ve come to wonder lately whether it’s in fact happening very slowly and we’re just at the very beginning of this change.  Elizabeth Eisenstein, who is a key scholar of Gutenberg said that it took 50 years for the book to take on its own form as a book.  If you look today at books, magazines and newspapers online or on tablets they’re still recognizable as books, magazines and newspapers.  We haven’t really reinvented things enough. 

So we just released some work at CUNY today about trying to map out new technology opportunities with journalism and Nick Decapolis a PhD we hired to do this really found a lot of areas of technology that really haven’t been explored much at all with journalism, so there are huge opportunities to go and look for them, not just try to recreate and preserve the old business models, but go ahead and disrupt and find the new opportunities.

In Their Own Words is recorded in Big Think’s studio.

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