After a quarter century as a columnist and editorial director of
MediaPost's events, Steve Smith is moving on from creating panels of ad industry pros to become editor-in-chief of "Panels & Prose," where he is
chronicling one of America's first mass mediums, the comic strip.
Listen to my conversation on the highs and lows of one of the industry's best and most insightful media critics and trade
journalists, and why the time is right for retiring from covering the ad industry.
In an addendum to this conversation, Smith added that the thing he is most proud of was covering the rise of
digital media in his Mobile Insider columns.
"The central conceit of that project was that to talk about this new tech and
medium we had to capture its intimacy and the way it was weaving into everyday lives," he says, noting: "So using my family as part of the story started two months after the iPhone launch on the
beaches of Cape May."
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Like me, Smith grew up learning about media in its analog days, from the inside out working, for his family business -- his father's ad agency in Northern New Jersey --
where he learned about writing copy, mechanicals and photography, not to mention "the art of persuasion."
Also like me, comic strips and comic books were his most impressionable medium, and
I've been lucky to have worked with at least two heroes that are part of that culture -- the journalistic comic strip writer and artist Stan
Mack -- and Steve Smith.
Smith, by the way, has a new book on the medium in the works, and I hope you'll follow him along in his new venture, because it's an important part of our media
culture.
Lastly, some of the most interesting parts of our conversation occurred after we stopped recording the video, but I have the audio and my notes, and I'm planning to use them in an
upcoming "Media 3.0" column, because it's all about our differing views on the role, impact and future of AI in the media business, as well as our world-at-large.
Let's just say we don't
exactly agree.
Stay tuned.