A panel assembled by the Aspen Institute think tank last week had a wide-ranging discussion in Washington, DC, on The Future of Content, sponsored by TMG Custom Media.
Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson — who now runs Aspen and earlier headed Time magazine and then CNN — said if he were hiring a journalist to work for him, he or she “would have to be fluent in three languages: Mandarin, Arabic and coding.”
Co-panelist Ken Auletta of The New Yorker, who wrote the book “Googled, the End of the World as We Know It,” said that Google’s Eric Schmidt once admitted to him that the search giant made a mistake in pushing to make the Internet free.
As important as the iPad seems to have been, Auletta said that the world appears to be heading to smartphones or smaller tablets.
“Everything is gravitating toward that hand-held device. And you are just going to see many more things — the speed is going to be greatly enhanced, and you’ll see cool new apps.”
Auletta ventured that even Mark Zuckerberg, if pressed for an answer on what’s going to be the hot new thing five years from now, would find it difficult to predict. “If I were Mark Zuckerberg, I couldn’t answer that question. And one of the reasons Mark Zuckerberg and all of this room is frightened is because they know everything is happening so fast, tomorrow he may be extinct. That’s what’s different about this age. The speed of change is exponentially faster.”
Several recent reports show that mainstream media, while recognizing the important impact of the revolutionary developments, are having a tough time adapting to them.
On the consumer side, according to a recent report in Advertising Age, while the magazine-publishing industry has welcomed the increasing importance of tablets, they still account for only a tiny percentage of publications’ paid subscriptions, citing the Audit Bureau of Circulations. Keith J. Kelly
Snow biz
The evil witch is about to replace the sexy vampire as Hollywood’s biggest crush.
Thirsty for a new genre, studios began targeting one of Disney’s biggest sweethearts, Snow White, early last year with an array of plot lines, and the first of two spinoffs are ready to square off.
Relativity Media struck first on Friday with “Mirror Mirror,” starring Julia Roberts and Lily Collins.
The flick, aimed mostly at families, is a humorous take on the classic and cost roughly $85 million to create.
Its first opponent, Universal’s “Snow White and the Huntsman,” which will premiere in June and stars a pair of sirens — Charlize Theron (pictured) and Kristen Stewart of “Twilight” fame — slightly surpassed its $100 million budget.
“Sony is looking into an indie script right now that puts Snow White in modern time,” a Tinseltown insider tells On the Money. “It’s only a matter of time until Disney puts the original back in the theater and in 3D. People are fascinated once again with this character. Which leads you to ask: Who’s next? Cinderella?”
That question will have to wait until another, more financially important one is answered.
Who is the fairest of them all at the box office? Joseph Barracato
Fore!
It must be April: The azaleas are in bloom at Augusta National, the home of The Masters golf tournament — and there is controversy in the Georgia air.
A longtime sponsor of the tournament has been IBM. And each newly named IBM chief has been invited to join the exclusive all-male golf club and wear the fabled green jacket.
The controversy arises with the new IBM CEO, Ginni Rometty.
Rometty, who does play golf, inherited the sponsorship from her predecessor, Sam Palmisano.
IBM is featured in the tournament’s TV commercials and runs its website, mobile-phone applications and media-center technology.
Palmisano serves on Augusta’s tournament technology committee. He remains IBM’s chairman — a role Rometty is likely also to assume upon his retirement.
So one of two traditions may fall this week: Rometty will either be the first female to wear the green jacket, or she will be the first sponsor CEO not invited to join the club.
The only thing certain is that the Augusta leadership will not rush their decision. Post staff