Innovations in Magazine Media World Report

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I got an unexpected out-of-the-blue e-mail earlier this week from John Wilpers, who apparently is the editor of the world association of magazines (FIPP - never hear of it before) annual book "Innovation in Magazine Media World Report" (never heard of if before, but here is some info on the 2012 report).

They were apparently writing up a story on the future of magazine reading and John had, during some last-minute research, stumbled on my course "Future of Media" and it's autumn 2012 theme "Future of Magazines/Magazines of the Future". John wrote that "The ideas seem fascinating based on the summaries on your website, so we'd like to get a little more detail".

I read his e-mail Tuesday morning and his deadline was Thursday! But we still managed to set up a Skype meeting already later that day.

I also sent him a bunch of useful links and he was really happy about what he found ("This is a GREAT resource. Thank you"). These links included the final presentation website, the list of guest lecturers in the course, the archive with texts and movies and especially the introduction (pdf) I wrote for the book we printed and that "explains it all". I talked with John over Skype later that day and suggested he take a closer look at some of the projects, for example by downloading the short movies that many project groups had created and then pursuing (reading about) projects which seemed particular interesting to him.

I have no idea what will come out of this. Everything that happened was confined to that one particular day. But I am really happy we put some extra effort into documenting this year's project and and also made an added effort to make the resulting materials more accessible on the web (thanks are especially due to Johan L and Sofie A!). John Wilpers promised to send me a copy of the book they're putting together and I look forward to receiving it later this spring and to find out what he made out of our course and the different magazine futures we proposed. As to the book he is editing, John wrote that:

"The book is distributed to 600 magazine executives in March at the annual Innovations confine in Berlin [never heard of it before] and then sold to magazine media people around the world (some 6000 copies)."

Cool! I really look forward to see what comes out of it! John also gave me access to the previous three Innovations in Magazine Media World Reports (2010, 2011, 2012), but this has been such a busy week I didn't have time to check them out. Now I have, and I realized these reports would have been a great resource for my course - it's a pity I didn't know about this when we gave the course last autumn!
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