Brian Morrissey

New York

Writer, Editor and Founder at The Rebooting

Host at People vs Algorithms

Columnist at Medieninsider

Writing about sustainable modern media businesses at The Rebooting.

Articles

The Rebooting in Cannes

1 week ago | therebooting.com | Brian Morrissey

A quick update on our Cannes plans:Sign up for a pop-up Cannes text edition of The RebootingLet me know if you're interested in coming to any of The Rebooting's gatherings in CannesHouse partiesIt’s that time of the year when people ask someone who lives in the same city if they want to meet up 3,000 miles away.
Neil Vogel on Google Zero

1 week ago | therebooting.com | Brian Morrissey

The media business is about to enter AI mode. In the latest episode of The Rebooting Show, I speak with Dotdash Meredith CEO Neil Vogel. We spoke during the keynote session earlier this month at the Media Product Forum, which was a collaboration between The Rebooting and WordPress VIP. I appreciate that Neil is a pragmatist who doesn’t waste energy by complaining about our tech overlords. Cross-channel platform exclusively for publishersYou don’t need a huge team or tech stack to market smarter.
Wholesale vs retail

3 weeks ago | therebooting.com | Brian Morrissey

Welcome back to The Rebooting. This week, I wrote about something I’ve been noodling for a while: The differences between operating a wholesale and retail business. Almost all of my conversations with media operators who are not starting from scratch quickly land on the difficulties of operating the old model while building the new model. I see that happening between wholesale and retail. Be sure to check out our new research done in collaboration with BlueConic.
The messy middle of AI adoption

3 weeks ago | therebooting.com | Brian Morrissey

In today’s newsletter:New research from The Rebooting and BlueConic finds that publishers are stuck in an ambition-execution gap when it comes to implementing AIA conversation with Dynamo CEO Nicholas Carlson on skipping words on webpages for video on YouTubeReminder: Join us next week for a deep dive into how Recurrent migrated its tech stack without going insaneCross-channel platform exclusively for publishersYou don’t need a huge team or tech stack to market smarter.
The decline and fall of the article page

1 month ago | therebooting.com | Brian Morrissey

Yesterday, we held our second annual Media Product Forum in collaboration with WordPress VIP at Pier 59 in New York City. We convened over 100 product leaders at publishers for an afternoon of discussions that centered on an essential question: What should publishers be building now? More on that answer below. Also, we will be turning the sessions into podcasts that I’ll publish over the next couple weeks.
‘AI is not your problem’: Media product in transition

1 month ago | therebooting.com | Daniel Kolitz |Brian Morrissey

Yesterday, product professionals from publishers across the country gathered at Current at Chelsea Piers for WordPress VIP and The Rebooting’s Media Product Forum. At the heart of the event was the question of what comes after the article page as we’ve known it. Fragmented tech teams are rapidly trying to spin up forms of content that stand a chance of competing with ChatGPT and vertical video’s endless scroll.
Meetings People

1 month ago | therebooting.com | Brian Morrissey

I spent a good chunk of the week at the Possible conference, which has made remarkable progress in just three years to establish itself as a marquee stop on the marketing events circuit. Now whether there needs to be so many of these events throughout the year is another story but to me speaks to how humans are social creatures, not rational creatures.
Media product in the ‘more with less’ era

1 month ago | therebooting.com | Brian Morrissey

The heaving Fontainebleau lobby and a half dozen dueling happy hours at this week’s Possible conference is a reminder that AI is not going to wipe away everyone’s jobs. Humans will continue to find things to do – and plausible reasons to go to sunny places for meetings. See you in Cannes? We held a marketing leaders dinner last night in Miami in partnership with 1440. It was a great gathering to discuss the role of human curation in the age of AI.
Tech's media safe space

1 month ago | therebooting.com | Brian Morrissey

Let me know if you’ll be in Miami Beach for Possible next week. We are doing a pair of dinners, and I’ll be hanging out from time to time in the Fontainebleau lobby among the lanyarded masses. In today’s member essay, I wrote about how the tech industry is creating a parallel media ecosystem that’s aligned with its worldview in a way that journalistic outlets are not. Treating any group as a monolith is impossible, of course. Silicon Valley is vast and diverse.
Janice Min embraces more with less

1 month ago | therebooting.com | Brian Morrissey

Technically, Janice Min and I were colleagues for a time. My time in an Adweek cubicle overlapped with the start of her tenure at The Hollywood Reporter. I have respect for people who can win with different playbooks. What Janice is doing at The Ankler is very different from her past successes at Us Weekly and THR. A few things to know about:Our next Online Forum is tomorrow.