When I joined TWICE in 1995, I commuted from my apartment across the Hudson River listening to a Sony portable CD player.
It was barely 10 years into the compact disc era and I was behind the format times, with most of my music still on vinyl. I had spent the previous 10 years copying most of that vinyl to cassette tapes, as well as most of my friends’ music collections.
Now it was time to catch up, and for the next several years, I took a trip down to Lower Manhattan on nearly every payday, popped into J&R Music World, and splurged on a handful of CDs, many of them recommended by the very knowledgeable sales staff.
But despite my upgrade in technology, carrying around a bunch of CDs on my commute was clunky at best, and I often found myself returning to my cassette tapes and relying on my Casio portable cassette player.
It wasn’t until the MP3 revolution hit that I felt technology had finally caught up with my needs. My transition to a digital music library was swift and wonderful.
My commute is longer than it was back then and I still listen to music, but now I do it with the company of about 8,000 songs on my 160GB iPod. If that’s not enough, I can stream practically any song I can think of on my smartphone via the Spotify Cloud through wireless Bluetooth earbuds. When I arrive at my office, I pair my phone with a terrific Ultimate Ears Boom Bluetooth speaker and the music continues, though I’ll often take a break to fire up my SiriusXM Radio app to catch some MLB Network talk.
My entertainment choices are practically limitless thanks to the broad solutions technology offers, and there are parallels in the publishing world.
Today, social media and online networking have fundamentally changed the way many of us stay informed.
My Twitter feed is usually my first stop for breaking news each morning. I then scan my email, reading the myriad e-newsletters I subscribe to, and then it’s on to Facebook, to catch up on what’s going on in my friends’ and colleagues’ worlds.
When I next log in to LinkedIn, I’m usually prompted to congratulate someone on a work anniversary, a new job or a professional milestone.
My YouTube subscription updates follow, and then it’s back to email to scan my Google Alerts.
Only then can I turn my attention to the tasks at hand for the day. As TWICE’s new editor in chief, my primary responsibility is to keep you, the reader, informed and educated, and I look forward to the challenge of maintaining TWICE’s standing in the industry, while taking the brand in new directions.
One of those directions will be a concentrated effort to engage the industry through all the technology available to us, so I encourage you to follow us on Twitter @TWICEOnline, like us on Facebook, engage us on LinkedIn, and subscribe to our YouTube channel. I also hope you’ll send me your feedback on what we can do to bring you the knowledge you need to do your job better.
TWICE’s social-media information is in the box below, as is mine and all my colleagues’. We want our relationship with our readers to be a dialogue. I look forward to hearing from each and every one of you.
