Blog

Last month, N.E.O. Bernhardsson, a Hong Kong-based publisher, reached out to me after reading about Lean Media online. Independently, he and his Modes Vu team have developed a system that uses Lean Media principles and processes to develop art photography books featuring relatively unknown photographers from China and elsewhere. This post and interview will describeRead more

The Lean Media flowchart has undergone several iterations. In 2015, it looked like this: The idea was feedback cycles could take place at any stage of the production up to the hard launch. The soft launch was an integral feedback stage, as it allowed a highly polished version to be exposed to a public audience andRead more

In my forthcoming Lean Media book, I talk a lot about the digital-driven convulsions of traditional, 20th century media. Some sectors of the media industry have had it worse than others, though, such as newspapers and recorded music. This post will look at one data point from the music industry that illustrates how much thingsRead more

When I first started to devise the Lean Media framework for media production, I expected to encounter others working on similar methodologies. So far, though, I have yet to find any structured frameworks that are expressly about making media. That’s not to say that media people don’t think about what we do. We in theRead more

The Lean Media book project is still on track. In November, I wrapped up the second draft and sent it out to a group of beta readers including media professionals and lay readers. I am now synthesizing their feedback and determining what parts need to be brought back into the third draft. There are someRead more

Regardless of whether they use Lean Media methods or not, media pros frequently rely upon surrogate audiences to understand the market for new media. Surrogate audiences are groups of people who like media that’s similar to what you are working on. Let’s say you are producing a new TV show, Rodent World, which explores theRead more

The following post is excerpted from my draft manuscript about Lean Media. Please leave comments below to help me improve the draft! Looking at the Lean Media flowchart, some creators may be aghast at the use of “prototype” to describe early or incomplete versions of a work in progress: The concern is understandable. The termRead more

I’m in the midst of writing my Lean Media book and today was working on a chapter about Lean Media feedback. Since the beginning feedback has been a central part of the Lean Media framework, and the last version of the flowchart had audience feedback coming back to the creative team after the idea, prototypes, and soft launch.Read more

In my July update, I mentioned the development of the three principles of Lean Media, which came out of my work on the Lean Media book as well as my spring presentation to a small audience that included media people. In this post, I will describe the 3 principles of Lean Media in more detail, and present a diagramRead more

So I am working on a new chapter for my Lean Media book that covers the Lean Media flowchart (see an early version of the flowchart here). Conceptually I thought I was pretty clear on what the different stages entailed. A prototype was a rough or incomplete version of the media being developed. By the timeRead more