The Convergence Newsletter

A program note from your host ...

In addition to my regular duties here at USC, I have become executive editor of The Convergence Newsletter, a mostly monthly (except for a couple of months a year) e-mail newsletter on trends in media convergence that has grown out of our work at Newsplex.

That makes me the chief beggar and pleader for articles. So consider yourself having been pleaded to.

The first few years have focused heavily on the news media and domestic developments, and Editor Brad Petit and I still want hear from newsrooms about what is working and what is not. But we also want to expand our offerings to include insightful work from around the globe. We hope to broaden the vista to look not only at journalism but at entertainment and at the effects convergence may be having on communities and societies.

Convergence is a broad term, and we don't hew to one definition. As Rich Gordon's seminal work showed, convergence can be defined in terms of technology, organizations, ownership, information gathering and information presentation, among others. Web 2.0 shows us it also can be defined in terms of the formation and coalescing of new communities. In some ways, these may irrevocably change existing communities and traditions.

The Convergence NL is edited but not peer-reviewed. It is an excellent place to try out your first cut of an idea. We also welcome book reviews and suggestions for books to review. (Publishers, if you have a volume relevant to convergence, contact me.)

We encourage both academic and professional articles of from 600 to 1,000 words, and we run about three an issue. Please consider contributing. You can contact me at dfisher@sc.edu with your ideas. You'll probably hear back from Brad, who, mercifully, handles the nuts and bolts of keeping things running.

I also encourage you to "subscribe" by dropping us a note with your e-mail address. Or you can go to our blog, http://convergencenl.blogspot.com, which we started to provide an RSS feed with links to the newsletter on the Web and a way to encourage comments. You'll also find the relevant links in my right rail.

Thanks, and I hope to hear from you.
Doug