Predictions for 2016: Education, China, Platforms and Blockchain. As I see it.

For many years now I’ve been putting my thoughts about the future of the media and publishing in writing.  Here are my thoughts on the coming year.

2016 Predictions:

Education publishing may well see a lot of turmoil during 2016.   At Houghton Mifflin, CEO Linda Zecher has continued to make changes to her organizational and executive team, while at Cengage Michael Hansen‘s team is now well bedded in.  In both cases, the companies are focused in investing in digital products and distribution, which they couldn’t do doing while their businesses were under considerable financial constraints prior to refinancing.   Where change will really be evident is at Pearson, Wiley, Scholastic and Macmillan.   Given the share slides of both Wiley and Pearson, I expect some restructuring is inevitable at both companies.   Pearson has already announced significant headcount reductions and has sold off most of its ‘non-core’ operations.  Pearson’s share price is at a ten-year low and any long-term shareholder must be wondering what happened to the ROI from the asset sales and education company purchases made during the past 10 years.   At the current price, the company must be a target for private equity.  Perhaps even Bertelsmann will take a close look at the company in collaboration with a PE company.

Similarly, at Wiley there is an argument that their educational division is not big enough to be a “real” player against the bigger companies.   That may have been fine when the business as a whole was running well; however, the business is fighting a general market slow-down and internal operational issues, all of which are reflected in their operational results.   Look for some announcement in 2016 that Wiley is looking at ‘strategic options’ for parts of its business.   It is also possible that Scholastic may consider similar options for its education business and perhaps Macmillan could look to pick up more assets to grow the scale of their education textbook business.

The expansion of China.  In years past I’ve predicted that a Chinese publisher would make a significant purchase in the US/Europe of an academic/professional publisher, but that has yet to happen.  Still, there have been small, modest investments by Chinese publishers over the past few years and the Chinese publishing industry has begun to expose itself internationally at BookExpo, LBF, etc.  I think this shows increasing confidence (which may have been lacking five years ago) and that makes expansion into western markets a probability.  In addition, there is a recognition that the domestic Chinese publishing market is significant, both in size and reputation, and this presents international expansion opportunities for Chinese publishers which were not appreciated five years ago.  This developing strength will also help propel Chinese publishers towards global expansion.

And, just this week, a Chinese consortium announced it was bidding for Opera, a web browser design company based in Norway.  While this deal is not directly in our market, it is indicative of the intention of Chinese investors to expand into the media market in a big way.  (Opera actually has a larger role in content distribution than may be obviously apparent).

Platforms purposely open will become a strategic imperative for all CTOs looking for new content management options in the coming years.  The launch of Facebook, Apple News and other large distribution networks will actually convince more content owners that their content repositories and distribution networks need to be built with open-source, non-proprietary tools, and retain open APIs so that linking and third-party application development can be encouraged and fostered.   While the entry of the larger players is important, it will not diminish the need for individual publishers (and/or aggregators) to maintain their own market presence.  What becomes more important is that the platforms on which these are built are true platforms which can be upgraded frequently, without disruption or added cost by the developer.  In addition, development and third-party app “tiers” sit on top of this base platform to enable extensions and ‘bespoke’ applications.  These latter elements can be built by the software provider, the client publisher or third-party developers.  The third-party development capability will become a marketplace for applications similar to the manner in which salesforce.com has established their developer community.   These product criteria will become critical entry points for any technology provider presenting their solution to education, academic and scholarly publishers from this point forward (if it isn’t already).

The growth of corporate communication platforms is another prediction I’ve made in years past.  It hasn’t yet become prevalent; however, I believe virtually all corporations and businesses are becoming publishers to some degree.   Accelerating this is the availability of the tools needed as well as the business imperative for companies to manage their own internal and external content in more effective ways.   I recently met an ex-colleague who has developed a content tool that enables a company to host its HR and policies and procedures manuals in a central service.  This content platform offers edit features so, not only is the content updated daily, but employees are empowered to offer input to improve procedures and safety practices, which can then be immediately rolled out to other offices.  A global retailer is now testing this tool across its business.   Similarly, communication with external constituencies can be improved significantly for many businesses by adopting many of the same practices which publishers have employed with their subscribers, like content platforms and access and control features.

Growth of licensing revenues:  CCC has been on an accelerated expansion of overseas activities which underscores the opportunities for publishers outside the US marketplace.   Most publishers are still focused on the form of their content but, increasingly form will be less and less important (the aforementioned Facebook and AppleNews sites are instructive on this point).  This will mean publishers providing flexible content and making it available to as many sources as possible will increasingly drive their revenues.   Licensing fees are becoming a very important source of revenue for publishers and if your revenues in this area haven’t increased more than 20% over the past three years you may want to re-think your policies.   Undoubtedly, licensed content will become one of a publisher’s main sources of revenue in the coming years.  This will have implications across businesses, especially for systems and accounting processes.

Application of Blockchain: And, speaking of copyright, expect to see the application of Blockchain to intellectual property rights.  As you know, Blockchain is the underlying foundation for BitCoin and, as such, its application to the protection and distribution of intellectual property will be another very interesting use.   Each step in a Blockchain transaction is protected by a tamper-proof encryption technology which supports BitCoin as a legitimate financial transaction service.   The use of Blockchain is being considered in several other applications, and media is one of them.

Blockchain can be used to facilitate the transfer of intellectual property from one owner to another.  Bitcoins are ‘tokens’ that represent money and are exchanged on the Blockchain network.  But there is no reason why a ‘token’ couldn’t represent some other specific item of value, such as a book or an article or a business case.  Once a transaction occurs, the user is supplied with a unique key for accessing the content.  If the user subsequently wants to sell or lend the item, they pass their unique key to the next person for their use.  This process eliminates the ‘residual’ copy issue which arises when someone tries to sell a second-hand e-file.

Ultimately, a network of “bitRights” ™ could represent a universal content repository or bazaar/market where rights and content could be exchanged or bought, traded and sold.  In addition, this aggregation would also generate significant user data and analytics to inform future pricing, content/topic areas, distribution models and a host of other benefits which currently get lost in the very inefficient rights and copyright clearance process we have today.   Recently, Ascribe received $2mm in seed capital to establish a Blockchain product for artwork.

Open Access for federal funded research will clear Congress in 2016.   In recent years, the Fair Access to Science & Technology Research Act (FASTR) bill has failed to pass Congress due to opposition from publishers and others.  FASTR will require any federal agency which provides more than $100million in grants (which, let’s face it, is a huge hurdle) to adopt an open-access policy.   Coupled with this will be more excitement and activity around the Obama Administration’s open data initiative.  Either way, there will be much more to happening in 2016 with open access to government information.   App developers and non-profit foundations are working together to drive better access to this type of information, and I recently saw a demo from CivicHall, which is doing just that for several cities already.

As always, I expect the coming year will be another exciting year with, I hope, the above trends occurring but almost certainly many other new and interesting things as well.

Michael Cairns has served as CEO and President of several technology and content-centric business supporting global media publishers, retailers and service provider.  He can be reached at michael.cairns@outlook.com and is interested in discussing new business opportunities for executive management and/or board and advisory positions.

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The Giant List of Publishing Predictions for 2016

Here is a listing of some interesting predictions for 2016 across the publishing and media sector:

Trade and Self-Publishing

Mark Coker from Smashwords provides a comprehensive exploration of trends for 2016 with particular focus on the Amazon subscription model and its impact on traditional publishers.  His post also includes extensive follow-up and comments: 2016 Book Publishing Industry Predictions: Myriad Opportunities amid a Slow Growth Environment

Jonathon Sturgeon as flavorwire suggests "Books by Committee, Self-Published Books by Computers" may be something we need to watch out for during 2016: From Adult Relaxation to Prole Erotica: Book Publishing Predictions for 2016

Blogsite Bookworks presents: 2016 Predictions for the Self-Publishing Industry

Digital Book World asked Tom Chalmers for his 10 Industry Predictions for 2016

Jane Friedman has 5 Industry Issues for Authors to Watch in 2016

Publisher'sWeekly: What Does 2016 Hold for Digital Publishing?

LA Times: 6 book trends for 2016: Look into the future

Academic and Scholarly Publishing

From Publishing Perspectives five predictions for open access academic publishing

From Scholarly Kitchen: Ask The Chefs: What Do You See On The Horizon For Scholarly Publishing In 2016?

General and Digital Media:

Deloitte Media: Telecommunications and Technology predictions for 2016 report

MediaPost: The Mobile Revolution Accelerates

From Talking New Media Five digital publishing predictions from Arazoo Nadir

From Publishing Executive magazine:  2016: The Year Ahead for Publishing in 12 Words

From MediaShift:  VR Heats Up, Publishers Wise Up to Fraud and 10 Predictions for Media Metrics

Techcrunch: Predictions on the future of Digital Media

What's new in publishing: Digital Publishing Predictions for 2016 

From Mequoda: 3 Subscription Website Publishing Predictions for 2016

A Gartner report Top Strategic Predictions for 2016 and Beyond:  The Future Is A Digital Thing. (but requires registration)

Millward Brown: Digital and Media Predictions 2016

equimedia: Digital media predictions for 2016

Fred Wilson: 2016 Predictions

Top Indian publishers predict digital publishing trends for 2016

Newspaper/Journalism:

Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, released a new report: Media, Journalism and Technology Predictions 2016. 

From Neiman Labs: Predictions for Journalism in 2016

At Forbes and short set of suggestions: Who Will Win The Publishing Battle In 2016? Early Predictions For What's Next

There's more than enough here to keep anyone busy well into 2016.  For my predictions from years past click on this link to list all of them.

My Year in Reading 2015

Each year the web site The Millions asks a long list of people to contribute their year of reading and I've done something of the same thing on this site over the years.  Nothing recent however as PND has been in a stasis for several years.   Each year I tend to read between 25 and 30 books which is happily well above the average: I'm always looking to support the industry.   This year I will probably reach 30 again which has as much to do with the huge amounts of travel time I've experienced over the past 30 months as it does the fun in reading itself.

Most of my reading is fiction and given I was looking for escape in my reading this year, I only read three non-fiction books during year.  One, How the Music Died, was an account of the way the old line music industry was essentially destroyed by a very small number of hackers and criminals who stole music CD's and placed the music on file sharing sites.  A fascinating aspect of the sub-culture that developed in this environment was the competition between hacker groups for the largest list of titles and the fastest access to new releases.

Several years ago I decided to add some classic titles to the list of books on my 'to be read' pile and this year I probably read more than I anticipated from Catch-22 to 1984 to Catcher in the Rye.  I keep a separate list of classics I want to read and some of these are books I read in high school or college but most are books I've never read.  1984 is a scary reminder given the extent of our current surveillance 'culture' and where it might get to.   Reading Catch-22 you don't know whether to laugh or cry.

All the books I read I am generally happy with but naturally some are always better than others.  This year I read the Ibis trilogy by Amitrav Ghosh (Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke and Flood of Fire).  These books are set in India and China during the Opium trade in the mid 1800s.  It's some of the best writing I've experienced and I hope we see a TV mini-series based on the books.

I bought The Luminaries for Mrs PND a few years ago but she hasn't cracked it so I did.  This book was excellent and at over 800 pages it may seem daunting but it reads much faster and I really enjoyed it.  The book follows the experiences of a prospector named Walter Moody in gold rush New Zealand during the 1860s who is exposed to a series of mysterious unsolved crimes.  The book won The Booker prize in 2013.

Here is my complete reading list for 2015:

A Week in the Airport - Alain de Botton:      Too close to my recent travel experiences
The Redeemers - Ace Atkins:           Good story, excellent writer
Red Harvest - Dash Hammett:      Violent and bloody
The Dain Curse - Dash Hammett:      Ditto
The Girl in the Spider's Web - David Lagercrantz:   I really enjoyed this one.
A Distant Mirror - Barbara Tuchman:    I now know a lot about the 13th century
The Devil's Star - Jo Nesbo:      Violent but good storytelling
How the Music Died - Stephan Witt:  Very good review of how disaster happened.
Flood of Fire - Amitav Ghosh:  Excellent highly recommended.
The Cartel - Don Winslow:    Excellent storytelling.
Bangkok Asset - John Burdett:    Highly enjoyable cop/crime novel set in Bangkok
Catch-22 - Joe Heller:   It's quite a catch.  One of the best.
The Law of Simplicity - John Maeda:  Kinda obvious.
Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger:    Classic
River of Smoke - Amitav Ghost:  Ditto
The Girl on the Train - Paula Hawkins:   All looney.
Children of the Revolution - Peter Robinson:   Excellent story telling.
Gallows View - Peter Robinson:  Excellent storytelling
Burmese Days - George Orwell:   Depressing colonial
1984 - George Orwell:  Scary not quite prescient
Animal Farm - George Orwell:   Keep the pigs locked up
The Lady from Zagreb - Philip Kerr:  One of my favorite characters, Bernie Gunther.
The Luminaries - Eleanor Cotton:  Excellent, highly recommended
Elmore Leonard - Freaky Deaky:  EL is the master of the genre.  Never tired of his books
Sea of Poppies - Amitav Ghost:  Modern classic
Epitaph for a Spy - Eric Ambler: Good
Prayers for Rain - Dennis Lahane: Good storytelling

I've a few more books to complete by year end and to kick off 2016 I am taking Mary Beard's SPQR which has received some good reviews on holiday with me.  I think it will be a good way to kick off another year of reading.

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The Wire Cast Reunion at the Paley Center.

One of the benefits of traveliing as much as I have in the past 18mths is I get to catch up on a lot of TV. This show is one of the best ever and close watchers will know that the scripts benefited from the likes of George Pellecanos, Denis Lehane and Richard Price. (Cameo's for all I think). Unfortunately, the Paley Center has now made this video unavailable. Maybe is has to do with Gov. O'Malley.

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MediaWeek (Vol 7, No 31): Bezo's WaPo, Publishing a Book, BitLit, James Garner + More

These articles and a lot more are all in my 'magazine' on Flipboard.

The Columbia Journalism Review takes a look at Bezo's WaPo:

At the time of the sale to Bezos, Donald Graham, Weymouth’s uncle and the chairman of The Washington Post Company, explained that he and his niece felt unsure of the direction in which to take the paper, or how to reverse years of declining revenues. He had approached Bezos as a buyer, he said, because the billionaire could offer deep pockets, a digital brain, and, between the two, a way forward.

From The Chronicle of Higher Ed: Things you should know before publishing a book.

You can probably make more money having a first-class yard sale.

WaPo report on the Hachette Amazon feud with the answer to everyone's question:

Amazon.com has finally laid out the reasons behind its months-long e-book dispute with Hachette Book Group, arguing that it is advocating for a new pricing and revenue sharing plan that will ultimately boost book sales, lower prices and benefit the entire publishing industry.

Techcrunch: Can BitLit solve the eBook/pBook gap?

This is still a pilot so there aren’t many books, but it’s a clear validation that BitLit’s concept is gaining traction in the publishing world.

Clive James in The Atlantic writes an appreciation of Jimmy Garner.  (And I've been catching up with The Rockford files over the past few weeks - always a great opening sequence).

James Garner, you can bet on it, has never told an important lie in his life. He really is like the men he plays onscreen, even unto the modest requirements symbolized by the humble trailer that serves Jim Rockford for a residence. 

 Three Economist articles that I thought were interesting:

In Estonia - a national digital id scheme might go global.

On competition: The growth in online travel agents.  Interesting because it shows how competitors can develop and grow even when there is a highly dominant competitor.

The digital degree: So demand for education will grow. Who will meet it? Universities face a new competitor in the form of massive open online courses, or MOOCs. These digitally-delivered courses, which teach students via the web or tablet apps, have big advantages over their established rivals.

From the PND Twitter feed:
Lindsay Lohan Wants Fifty Shades Of Grey's EL James To Write Her Biography - Report | EntertainmentWise http://po.st/ZqqifL  Tragic.

Building a Better Amazon by PublishersWeekly

Warner Bros. Snatches Up Movie Rights to ‘The Goldfinch’ http://flip.it/2lAIl

Amazon Partners with Warner Bros for Digital First Imprint Goodreader

Enid Blyton's Famous Five to get big screen adventure http://gu.com/p/4v98p/tw  

MediaWeek (Vol 7, No 29): Amazon, The LMS, Director's Cut, Open Access + More

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From the NYTimes: Amazon, a Friendly Giant as long as it's fed.

“Everything Amazon has promised me, it has fulfilled — and more,” he said. “They ask: ‘Are you happy, Vince? We just want to see you writing books.’

Changes ahead for the humble learning management system (Inside Higher Ed)

“I think we’re in a weird place right now in the marketplace -- partly because there’s a lot of parity between the systems,” Severance said. “You can almost throw a dart at a dartboard and pick an LMS, and it won’t be that bad.”

Andrew Ladd at The Newstatesman thinks publishers should think about the director's cut.

Besides, what’s wrong with a little naked commercial ambition in the publishing industry, given everything we’re always hearing about the death of the book? There’s clearly a demand for this sort of thing.

Lots of print about the Kindle all you can eat. Almost as much fun as the race between GigaOm and PL in getting the story out.

No big-5 publisher appears to be participating yet, based on my preliminary glance through the test pages. Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins have both made their ebooks available to Scribd and Oyster, but I haven’t yet seen books from those publishers on the Kindle Unlimited page

Open access is not enough according to The Guardian.

Earlier this month, Nature Publishing Group launched Scientific Data – a broader, interdisciplinary publication dedicated to a more specific type of data paper: the data descriptor. This new category of peer-reviewed publication provides detailed descriptions of individual or combined experimental, observational and computational datasets.

At the Hong Kong bookfair people camp out to get in first and also plan to spend thousands (SCMP)

Vacilando Yip Chun-kit, 18, left his home in Sheung Shui last night and joined the queue at 4am to be among the first batch into the fair.

Photo: High school throw back.

Biggish reunion this weekend.  At one point there were five Michaels in this class.

Mary Meeker's 2014 Internet Trends Report

KPCB Internet trends 2014 from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

MediaWeek (Vol 7, No 26) Dangerous Literature, Newspapers, Ranking Publishers, MOOC Feedback + More

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From The Chronicle of Higher Ed, a discussion on when books were dangerous:

The American Library Association, which designates the final week of September as Banned Books Week, has no problem finding titles to fill its annual lists of books under siege. However, these are generally books that have been removed from particular libraries or schools, not the kind of total proscription imposed on Ulysses, as well as Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer, Naked Lunch, Lolita, and other works that have since become staples of literary study. Over the decades since the Woolsey decision, authors, publishers, and judges have struggled to parse the differences between "indecent" and "obscene" and determine the meaning of such terms of art as "prurient interest" and "redeeming social value." However, the upshot is that, though sexual explicitness and offensive language are the most frequently cited reasons for which books are now challenged, neither is now a legal barrier to publication or sale.

Publishers Weekly has updated their hugely useful listing of top publishers by revenues:

Although there was a fair amount of deal making among the global book publishing giants last year, those mergers and acquisitions did not have much of an impact on the top of Livres Hebdo/Publishers Weekly’s annual ranking, based on annual revenue, of the world’s largest publishers in 2013. Pearson came in first, with $9.33 billion in revenue, followed by Reed Elsevier, Thomson/Reuters, and Wolters Kluwer. All four educational and professional publishers held the same respective positions on the list in 2012.

Wired Campus blog at CHEd has a look at digital versus print from the AAUP annual meeting last week in New Orleans.

Christopher Schaberg, an associate professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans, said he appreciates well-done print books more now than before the rise of e-books. Mr. Schaberg is not averse to e-publishing; he is a co-editor of the Object Lessons book and essay series, which appears in both print and digital formats. But he pointed out that e-texts aren’t necessarily more efficient for teaching purposes; he recalled a class in which everybody had an iPad but it took much time to get all the students on the same page, so to speak.

On a global scale it has long been arguable that newspapers are dying and here is another look by The Atlantic.

This captive readership is also the bedrock of the business model. Businesses seeking to target immigrant communities often find more value in advertising in these small publications than the mainstream press.

Disruptions like Craigslist, which has bled dry classified sections of large print publications, have had limited impact on these publications. The foreign-language ethnic press is reaching an audience that isn’t necessarily online and doesn’t always understand English. Nearly a quarter of New York’s population, according to the U.S. Census data, isn’t proficient in English.

The result is that many of these publishers can still support their operations with revenue from print advertising. Castaño, for example, makes 90 percent of his money from print ads, with the majority coming from local businesses. “I’ve been profitable since the beginning,” he told me.

That’s also partly because the Queens Latino only has one full-time employee: Castaño. The rest of the work is done by freelancers, and Castaño’s wife does the layout and design.

At the Urdu Times, Rehman has outsourced most of his newspaper’s operations to a small production unit in Pakistan. “I have 18 people working for me in Lahore,” he explained. The copies are drafted there and then emailed to the basement in Queens for proofreading, as are all the page layouts. Rehman and his wife approve everything, and then forward it to the printers. His only full-time employee in New York is an advertising manager, who has his own desk at the back of the store above the basement.

Rowling may be telling the publishing industry what she thinks about the industry in her newest book as contemplated by The New Republic:

It’s also one of ego-maniacs. And the writers, or would-be writers, are the worst of the batch. When the amateur author of erotica describes her work to Strike in rehearsed phrases and sound bites, he wonders how many people “who sat alone for hours as they scribbled their stories practiced talking about their work during their coffee breaks.” (One wonders: Did—or does—Rowling do this?) Meanwhile, Quine’s agent describes him “as a bigger glutton for praise than any author I’ve ever met, and they are most of them insatiable.” Of course, this agent, a wannabe writer with a first in English from Oxford but no novels to her name, turns out to be pretty insatiable herself.

Instant gratification can be a double edge sword for academics serving online courses (The Conversation):

When your classroom is a global one, filled with well-informed online learners, they don’t cut you much slack. Hundreds of people pore over every element of your course, making well-informed and sometime acerbic comments. Academics who run Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are finding that they can’t afford any sloppy reasoning, one-sided arguments, or narrow perspectives when teaching to a massive global audience.

As academic lead at FutureLearn, a company offering free online courses from UK universities, I’ve seen that this instant feedback can be eye-opening for course designers.

On a university campus, students stick around even though the teaching may be dreadful, because they need the degree qualification. In MOOCs they leave as soon as they lose interest.

So far, much of the debate in the United States about MOOCs has focused on the dropout rate. Typically, just 7-10% of students enrolled on a course from a US MOOC provider reach the end. But that assumes completion should be the goal of online learning, and that students who drop out early are failures. Much of the early publicity around free online courses focused on them as alternatives to an expensive campus university education. It’s hardly surprising that the simplest measure of failure, student dropout, has been picked up by commentators hoping to burst the MOOC bubble.

For the music lovers, something from Salon on Led Zeppelin

Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin II, and Led Zeppelin III have recently been given deluxe reissues by Atlantic Records. Each package contains a remastered version of the original album, along with a generous helping of bonus tracks. The first boasts a live set from a concert in Paris in 1969 (which has been floating around the Internet for years) while the second two include collections of rough mixes from the sessions from Led Zeppelin II and Led Zeppelin III, respectively.

The remastering is pretty superfluous: These are, and always have been, three of the most perfect sounding rock albums ever made. The rough mixes of II and III, though, are a revelation, casting light on Jimmy Page’s immense talents as a producer and giving us the opportunity to rediscover this band as they were, four absurdly gifted young people making music together, as opposed to the rock deities they’d forever after be imagined as. You can hear Page’s pick scraping string on a demo-ish “Whole Lotta Love,” Robert Plant feeling his way through an early pass at “Ramble On,” Bonzo counting the band back in on a skeletal version of “Moby Dick,” the careful interplay of Page’s acoustic and John Paul Jones’ mandolin on a rough cut of “Gallows Pole.” Listening to the ragged life behind these recordings reminds us, on the one hand, that four guys made these records. It also reminds us, on the other, that four guys made these records. Sometimes being made human only heightens your immortality.

James Bridle in the Guardian tells us why digital art matters:

Given this, it seems crucial that it is also accessible to all; not merely engineers, scientists, politicians and policy-makers, but also artists, commentators and the general public. There has never been a greater need for critical engagement with the role technology plays in society, but there's a corresponding problem with that engagement, as severe now as it was when CP Snow diagnosed it in 1959: the lack of understanding between the sciences and the humanities.

If anything, digital technologies have rendered this problem even more acute, as the vast and smoking industrial architectures of the 20th century give way to the invisible, intangible digital architectures of the 21st. If technological literacy is going to rise, it's going to need the help of artists to enlarge its vocabulary, and the leadership and guidance of cultural institutions to frame the discussion.

Different institutions are approaching this in their own way. This summer, the Barbican unveils its take, called Digital Revolution. The Barbican has form in this area: in 2002, it staged the hugely popular Game On, a retrospective of video games which included everything from original Space Invaders arcade games to Grand Theft Auto. Digital Revolution aims to walk a similar line through the entire history of digital creativity, showcasing not only some of its signature events and works, but also the stories of their creators. According to the curator Conrad Bodman, "It's not a show that just looks at contemporary art, but film, music, video games and design, the way they relate to each other, and sometimes merge into one."

Columbia Journalism Review looks into investments in media for millenninials

This problem goes deeper than man-buns and Lena Dunham, though. This month, for example, the GroundTruth Project, which trains young reporters as international correspondents, launched a project called “Generation TBD: Despair and opportunity for millennials in an uncertain global economy.” It will deploy 21 reporting fellows in 11 countries to dig into an issue legacy media has, at times, treated like a joke—the place of millennials in the economy today.

Although GroundTruth Project isn’t explicitly targeted towards any generation, it is distinctively millennial in its desire to make a difference in the world.

“It’s such a rough time—it’s risky to care too much. We’re trying to build an environment in which caring is fine,” says Kevin Grant, the managing editor.

GroundTruth Project grew out of the international news site GlobalPost; the initial idea was to raise nonprofit funding to cover social justice issues in more depth. The project, says Grant, works “to identify these big stories that impact a lot of people, and we try to identify them before our colleagues at other organizations.” And for “Generation TBD,” the GroundTruth Project, with its team of young reporting fellows, has an in and an angle to this story that older media organizations might not