Winter: A season for a few good books

Well, it was pretty exciting in Deerfield tonight, what with a Great Horned Owl calling from two blocks down the street at 8:45. Of course, the only reason I was outside to hear him was that I was straggling home from Northwestern at that hour, extracting my daily quota of catalogs from the mailbox.

And the reason I was straggling home was that I stayed in Evanston until I had more or less finalized a reading list for my winter class for graduate students. The winter term is almost as close as actual winter: It starts Jan. 4 at 9 a.m.

It’s the reading list work that has kept me away from blogging the last couple weeks:

• The good news for me is that I worked my way through thousands of pages chock full of good ideas and trenchant observations, many of them published over just the past few weeks and months.
• The good news for my students is that part of the exercise was identifying the absolutely most pertinent few pages in each of these books to assign to them.
• And the even better news for me, my students, and the copyright holders is that my colleague Dr. Rachel Davis Mersey pointed me to a company, University Readers, that handles copyright clearances for book excerpts and then assembles them into a “course pack” that students can buy for a tiny fraction of the cost of that stack o’ books.

My nearly final draft of the syllabus begins this way:

The objectives of this course are

• first, to reset the starting point from which students view both the craft and the business of journalism;
• second, to familiarize students with the media industry and its rapidly changing practices in areas including business, operations, technology and content; and
• third, to position students to capitalize on changes they encounter during their careers.

So, in order to accomplish that, what have I been reading?  After the jump, you will find a partial bibliography of my reading list.

Of course, some books are too interesting or important or trenchant or closely argued to be excerpted.  Such a book is the new Ken Auletta, Googled: The End of the World As We Know It. So alone among my recent readings, that’ll be one we peruse from beginning to end.

One more observation:  Wired magazine remains tremendous.  Several recent pieces also made the cut, making me glad that I not only have maintained my subscription, but that I keep them handy on my office shelves.

At any rate, now it’s time to move on to the lectures and presentations.  But I sure have a lot of ideas in my head to play with.  Oh, and if you take the trouble to go to the jump and look at my recent reading, do me a favor:  If you see some recent book that I should be diving into, by all means let me know.

Selected bibliography, “How 21st Century Media Works”

• Chris Anderson, The (Longer) Long Tail (Revised and Updated): Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, Hyperion, 2008.
• Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, Hyperion, 2009. Pages 135-161. ISBN 978-1-4013-2290-8.
• John Battelle,  The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, Penguin/Portfolio, 2006.
• Clayton M. Christensen and Michael E. Raynor, The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth, Portfolio, 2005.
• Rita Clifton (editor), Brands and Branding (Second Edition), Bloomberg Press, 2009.
• James T. Hamilton, All the News That’s Fit to Sell, Princeton University Press, 2003.
• Jack Fuller, What’s Been Happening to the News, University of Chicago Press, 2010.
• Jeff Jarvis, What Would Google Do?, Collins Business, 2009.
• Mitch Joel, Six Pixels of Separation, Business Plus, 2009.
• Alex S. Jones, Losing the News: The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy,Oxford University Press, 2009.
• Jonathan A. Knee, Bruce C. Greenwald, and Ava Seave, The Curse of the Mogul: What’s Wrong with the World’s Leading Media Companies, Portfolio, 2009.
• Philip M. Napoli, Audience Economics: Media Institutions and the Audience Marketplace, Columbia University Press, 2003.
• Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organization, Penguin Books paperback, 2009.
• David Weinberger, Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, Henry Holt, 2007. Pages 199-230. ISBN 978-0-8050-8811-3.
• The Big Thaw: Charting a New Future for Journalism, a white paper by The Media Consortium, July/September 2009.