Welcome to ¡AU! Journal, a quarterly magazine helping media pros like you to manage change.
I’ve edited a good number of media & entertainment publications, covering tech, business, and creativity. My POV has usually been from the path less traveled.
When I was editor at TVBEurope, we started to push sustainability and to champion BAFTA albert when most people still believed the climate crisis would solve itself.
At FEED magazine we tried to offer a platform that could explain complex media technology ideas to very busy—but not always tech savvy—decisionmakers, while always fitting in stories of social responsibility from the industry when we could—what came to be called “DEI”.
The Flint was the industry’s first publication—that I know of—dedicated full-time to sustainability in the media & entertainment sector.
We built a library of content on everything from sustainability in special fx to green issues around data centers. And we started what I hope will be an ongoing tradition of train-based networking (and partying) with The Flint Green Line, a networking event on a Eurostar carriage from London to Amsterdam.
¡AU! was launched this spring to provide content, networking, and creative services for a media industry navigating the most unpredictable period—commercially, socially, and creatively—it has faced in many decades.
There is a very bumpy ride ahead.
Whatever happens in the next decade, rest assured that it’s going to be a surprise. Almost any prediction we can make is going to be off.
That’s terrifying. But also exciting. As the expression goes: The only way out is through. Businesses that concentrate on moving and doing will be in much better shape than those holding on and digging in. The way to weather this storm is to create and innovate your way through it.
¡AU! spun up its first event in March, the Emergency DEI Summit (officially “Emergency summit on the collapse of DEI in the entertainment industry”) and was a response to the capitulation by major media companies to the radical anti-DEI stance in the US.
The Summit was made up of three online discussion panels, plus networking. That Summit content forms the basis of this first issue of ¡AU! Journal, where we go into some depth about the crisis of racism and sexism in the US, its immediate effects on the media industry, plus the potential chain reaction for the industry globally. In addition to analysis, in the pages ahead, you’ll also be able to access the video from each session.
Championing undersupported talent is a perfect theme for this launch issue of ¡AU! Journal. We take it as self-evident that art is, by definition, something that only humans do. If we want creative work to be the best it can be—if we want a creative industry that thrives, grows, prospers—we have to start with, and end with, nurturing and growing humans.
More and more we’re taken in by the myth that all you need for success is a good idea and some good tech and the world is your oyster. While there are countless creatives out there running side hustles along those lines, a career that evolves and grows, has depth and longevity, requires more cultivation. If you pick the name of one of your creative heroes from a hat, you’ll find that their story is full of people, institutions and circumstances that helped them along. There is no such thing as a self-made classic.
At ¡AU! our mission is to you connect with people and ideas that will help make your creative business prosper.
More importantly, we hope we can empower you to help other creative businesses, individuals, and projects prosper. It’s well understood that getting other people to success increases the likelihood of your own.
We hope you enjoy this first issue of ¡AU! Journal. We also hope it makes you angry. And inspired. We hope you’ll grow along with us. We look forward to hearing your stories and collaborating as we navigate the tricky times ahead together. And along the way I hope we can create something new and worthwhile and lasting.
Oh, and if you’re still trying to figure out how to pronounce it, try saying “hey you”—loud.