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For the last few years, the name Manuel Castells kept popping up in things I read about digital media, social networks, and mass communications. He is a Spanish sociologist who spent much of his career at UC Berkeley. Recently I have been reading his "The Rise of the Network Society," the first of three volumes in a series "The Information Age." He wrote them two decades ago, but he seems to have predicted many of the trends we are living through now. The free flow of money, information, and power through global networks means those networks, not nations, are the source of power, he wrote. Institutions, societies, and ethnic groups with rigid structures that cannot take advantage of these flows will be left behind. He wrote a new preface for the 2010 edition, before the Arab Spring, before the Syrian civil war, before Brexit, before Trump. He pointed out that structural changes were taking place in society because large sections of the world's population were ...

Emilio Garcia-Ruiz speaks to the press in Huesca. Photo by EFE HUESCA, Spain -- Yes, it�s good to have a billionaire owner with patience, but it�s even better to have a billionaire owner with a vision. And the vision of Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos is that a news organization has to make its work available free, everywhere. Bezos is urging the publication's journalists to adopt the principles of retail sales that he has learned over the years in running Amazon , America's largest online retailer of practically everything. And the man who is putting that vision into practice is Emilio Garcia-Ruiz , the Post's managing editor for digital. Versi�n en espa�ol A fundamental concept in retail strategy is the sales funnel, Garcia-Ruiz said in his keynote address March 10 at the Digital Journalism Conference in Huesca, Spain. The idea is to get as many people as possible to sample your product (in journalism, it's through sharing in social networks ), get them to pay for...

Jose Luis Orihuela has been writing about digital media for almost 30 years. So I have been enjoying his new book, "The Media Since the Internet" ( �Los medios despu�s de Internet �), which is a compilation of his columns for newspapers in Spain and Latin America in 2011-2013. (His 159,000 Twitter followers around the world know him as @jlori. ) Orihuela, a professor and colleague of mine at the Universidad de Navarra in Spain, takes us on his intellectual voyage and shows us the courage and vision we need to navigate this sometimes scary new world of the Internet. Versi�n en espa�ol Each of these columns in the book is a like an entry in the logbook of a voyage of discovery through the uncharted waters that the new media environment represents. Like the explorers of the 15th century, Orihuela observes, processes, analyzes, speculates, and makes recommendations based on his investigations. He drops some marker buoys to help us follow his path. The result is a guide that i...

Michael McCutcheon of Mic.com As the publisher of a business newspaper in Baltimore, I used to tell advertisers confidently that no other news medium could duplicate our audience of CEOs, business owners, and high-income decision makers. First Yahoo Finance undermined us. With their user database, they could deliver advertisers the same people who were reading our newspaper, plus many with that profile who were not. (Versi�n en espa�ol) Now social networks like Facebook are using their data to do the same thing. They can promise to deliver that same targeted audience a lot cheaper. This is bad news for news publishers, especially since they have become more dependent on Facebook and other social networks for their Internet traffic. Publishers have a harder time establishing the value of their brand to advertisers. Pew Research reported in 2014 that 30 percent of U.S. adults get news from Facebook. That percentage has been growing, and other social networks, such as LinkedIn , are tr...