Photo credit: Morning Road by Chicanery In WI. Excellent shot, bravo and thanks.

"As a media historian, what I understand about the emergence of new media is that they don't wipe out old media but they force them to adjust in some important way, so there is a rearrangement of the panoply of media. The publishing companies are like the oil companies in relation to solar power or hydrogen. They know that it's got the potential to destroy their monopoly so they are trying to control it, they buy up the patents and try and manage the transition. But they don't really know where it's going, they don't have much of a vision of how to adopt to the new digital universe." Adam Bellow

Adam has seen the future, read about his new role as pamphleteer via CJR Daily here. Reinventing the book for the 21st century, interesting concept, good luck Adam!

400 year death spiral continues: E&P's Joe Strupp reviews 2006 and notes the newspaper "budget wizards" have a need to nail down two things: "how to make money on the web and whether to charge readers." Strupp's Top 10 Newspapers Industry Stories of 2006 here. (Closed circuit to Joe - ring up Adam, and reach out to Jeff Jarvis).

Newsosaur makes a good call: Alan Mutter puts up some good reading about the recruitment category of classifieds. A comment from the research gang at Borrell is spot-on...“When the history of Internet advertising is written, recruitment sites will undoubtedly dominate the first chapter,” says Borrell. “In 12 years, these sites have grown from a few job boards to hundreds of niche competitors. Online recruitment now accounts for 25% of Internet advertising.” Check out Alan's entire post, Online tops newspaper job-ad sales, here. My second dot com job was working in the internet classifieds space. The worldwide classifieds annual spend is, generally, estimated to be about $100 billion (combined offline and online). Nothing but upside going forward. My sense remains finding and retaining the right talent will becoming ever more difficult. Put recruitment, and HR, on the 2007 reboot list.

2007 forecast; prediction #1: After having a strong year in 2006, outdoor will have another great year. As outdoor folks continue the digital migration of their assets compelling new value propositions will support ad spend growth second only to online. The street will rediscover good outfits like Lamar. The first tribe of wireless would do well to rediscover their own very special "out of home" value proposition (big upside in creative collaboration at the local level, visual + audio = unique engagement). My pov is Lamar may also be a perfect takeover candidate.

Best of 2006; take one - Top Five Best TV (pro) blogs: Those blogs a broadcast video person could not live without, blog and blogger noted. Lost Remote (Steve Safran), TV Newser (Brian Stelter), BC Beat (Higgins, a gentleman others can only succeed never replace), PublicEye (Vaughn Ververs) and Eat the Press (Rachel Sklar). Honorable mention: PoMo Blog (Terry Heaton is, arguably, the media essayist of the year).

Cuban to Broadcast TV: Wake up!
"Last year I said that Disney was brilliant for breaking the logjam and selling their shows on Itunes. This coming year, 2007 will be known as the year Broadcast TV leveraged HD to create a golden age of TV with huge gains in ratings vs non HD networks, or it will be looked back upon as the year Broadcast Networks blew it." Read Mark Cuban's Internet Video and how the Broadcast Networks are Missing the HDTV Opportunity, here

Steve Gillmor sings it his way here, Joel Spolsky provides translation replete with back stories and commentary here. Come on Steve, bring back the Gang! Bravo to Steve for his unvarnished take, Joel for the insights and to all involved in one of this year's best year-end geek posts.

Paul La Monica, media biz guy over at CNN Money: Best & Worst media stocks of 2006 wherein Martha's Omnimedia, Marvel, Comcast and Dr Malone's Liberty Media and CBS get their propers, here. Paul also suggests the private equity folks could take a bunch of trading symbols off the market next year and he may just be right. CC Outdoor combined with Lamar in a take out?

Legendary leader, broadcast pioneer, Dr. Frank Stanton: "thinker and doer" Variety obit here. Norman Horowitz writes...

I can only think of the "good old days" when a network like CBS, and executives like Bill Paley and Frank Stanton could stand up to the congress and the president from time to time in order to continue to report to America just what they thought was going on.

Frank Stanton will be missed, not because he died, but because he "stood for something important," during his life and only let the feds push him around some of the time.

Bravo Norman, well done! His entire post is here