It was more than 40 years ago now that Marshall McLuhan made his famous proclamation that the medium is the message. Since then we've managed to misconstrue his meaning quite successfully. Pretty much everyone these days takes the statement to mean that the value of a media property is just as important for the advertiser as the advertising message that appears within the medium. So, for example, it's just as important for a global investment company to appear in The Wall Street Journal and Barron's as it is for it to say interesting things in those journals.

This summer I was invited to teach a media planning course at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School of Communications. After years of guest-lecturing in its hallowed halls, USC bestowed upon me my very own tweed jacket, elbow patches, and pipe. I'm now a professor at this prestigious school for journalism and communications - okay, an adjunct professor, to be precise, but my mom is still awfully impressed.

News flash: there may be no "I" in team, but there most certainly is one in media. In fact, there are three: insight, ideas, and innovation. With the sweeping pace of change in the media landscape, this triple-I combo spells the new core competencies in our industry. They are the catalysts for success and the launch pads for the fast track. In other words, they're "must have" ingredients for communications platforms that combine content with context so compellingly that they capture consumer attention amid increasing clutter, noise, distractions, time scarcity, consumer control, and every other sky-is-falling trend bemoaned at media …

Meet our good friend Roy. We like Roy, but like most good friends he can be a pain in the ass. He's loud and crass; he tends to interrupt, doesn't listen, indeed essentially dominates the conversation. Sometimes we just want to slap him. But we can't do that, because our clients want him around. As a matter of fact, they like Roy more than we do.

With its September issue, Teen People published its final print edition, deciding instead to focus exclusively on an online edition.

"Absolutely not." It was the same response I always gave when asked whether I had joined the latest social networking Web site.

Kiss paper flyers good-bye.

At last, the passive-aggressive among us can get out of bad relationships as easily as normal people: Have Shannen Doherty do it on "Breaking Up With Shannen Doherty," a new reality show on the Oxygen cable network.

Before there were brands, there was branding - of livestock.

The industry has struggled to unlock itunes metrics, but Internet marketing firm Oneupweb says it has cracked the code.