In watching the C3 blog for some time now, it's been impressive to see the openness of its creator, Chuck Peters, as he tries to lead his Iowa media company through the changes all of us are experiencing.
He takes stock after seven months to write on what he's learning, what he's reading, and how it's bound to change the way he's operating his business. Clearly the changes include moving from a cash-generating broadcaster to an elegant organization able to serve much more defined needs --- serving communities of interest, for example, instead of geographic communities. But it's also not a matter of simply linking out and holding seminars about change.
"We need to change the tasks, titles and organization so that we are doing new tasks, in new ways, and making the results of our efforts available immediately to our communities as we begin the larger task of organizing all this information elegantly."

Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion is prepared to bet that U.S. media will be almost all digital by 2014 and that the tangible forms of media will be extinct or well on their way there.
 That's a fairly heady gesture, but his reasoning is the declining business model of print in the U.S. and the rise of digital media across news, broadcast and music.
I'd take that bet, only because demography is going to help legacy media a little bit as the boomers hit retirement age (but maybe not, if the economy continues to turn down, retirement itself) this decade.
And I'd like to think that devices will emerge to make the Kindle look primitive and the BlackBerry like a museum piece to consume text, audio and video without carrying along an extra suitcase in the process.
But the digital revolution is going to take a little breather in the next 18 months as innovators hunker down and find it tough to get the capitalists to venture.
If Rubel is looking for a turning point, maybe we'll be sorting it out by 2014. But habits don't change that quickly and 2,000 days aren't that far away.

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission some time ago indicated it had no purview over the Internet as a regulatory agency. But it has decided now to examine how broadcast content is flowing in an unregulated way online.
Its announcement today is a little cryptic because the issues themselves are still somewhat vague, but it clearly wants to take a look at how such online content commingles with broadcast regulations and programming requirements in Canada.
For the uninitiated, Canada imposes spending and scheduling requirements on broadcast licence holders in order to stimulate domestic production and cultivate domestic audiences for television and radio. The so-called Canadian content rules have been in effect for more than three decades and have been a factor in the development of Canadian music and programming.
The sense is that, if left unfettered by regulation, existing and emerging sites that aggregate and present content across the Internet could hurt Canadian broadcasters.
The review starts in February.

I waited a few days to see if perhaps the initial reports were somehow out of context or perhaps lost in translation, but I can't find anything to dispute the move last week by the Romanian Senate to pass a law mandating that 50 per cent of all broadcast news be positive.
The law will be implemented by a national council, which will have the enjoyable task of determining what constitutes good and bad news.
As a news manager, I'm asked all the time why we don't carry more positive news. I typically reply that there is plenty there for the perusing: Sports sections chronicle athletic prowess, Arts sections examine creativity, Business sections look at the generation of wealth and entrepreneurial innovation, and the news sections contain all sorts of stories on advances in medicine and science and the betterment of society. The adage in broadcasting --- if it bleeds, it leads --- hasn't been effective for some time, even if newscasts often start with the most shocking developments to attract interest.
But I don't think anyone would like a quota of even five per cent. The community will decide if you're too negative by moving to some entity that isn't.