michael.cervieri.com

Been a long time since I posted anything to this blog as well.

So what’s the who, what, where, when, how and why of what I’ve been doing lately?

Good question. And I think I have some answers.

Scribe moved. This is a good thing. While we made it through the economic disruption of the past year it made no sense to pay what we were paying for office space. Fortunately, construction giant Skanska needed an office near the World Trade Center site and took over our lease. This happened in August.

We were homeless for a month after that and worked remotely. This was actually quite pleasant as I spent a lot of time at our family’s house on the coast of Rhode Island. Now we’re in shared space at Sunshine Suites in Tribeca. We’ll use that for bizdev. In the background I’m combing Long Island City for studio space. I’m basically looking for something in the 1,500 square foot range with high ceilings where we can set up our audio/video gear and editing stations. It also means I could walk to work which would be nice.

In the meantime I started teaching a course at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. It’s called Tubes, Code and Content: Creating Media in our Digital Age and focuses on how NGOs, non-profits, community groups, activists and governmental agencies can use Internet and mobile communication technologies. So, it’s basically teaching students what I talk to clients about all the time for ScribeLabs.

I set up a community site for the course. You can see it here. And if you want to hear me in action, the first of my weekly lectures is now online and called “Media. Communication. Protest.“

This is much different than what I was doing at the Graduate School of Journalism (skills training and advising students on their Masters Projects) and hopefully there will be room and time to continue both.

In the meantime, I’m trying to figure out what to do with this space. I originally created it to communicate with my journalism students. I’d often re-blog content I created for ScribeMedia.org here but that seems redundant. Then I got into Tumblr and started re-blogging all sorts of found crap there but that fizzled back in June. I’m too busy to keep up with that. But I do Tweet a lot so I’m in that space quite often. And now I’m writing over at TubesCodeContent what I might have written here in the past for my students.

So where does that leave this space? Good question. Perhaps as ground control for what I do elsewhere? But also for random musings and projects that don’t fit elsewhere, like, say, my weird music mashups. We’ll see.

More importantly, Sasha and I are still in Queens. She’s overseeing SMAC as we try to grow it into a sustainable publication. She’s also writing and creating videos for what seems like the delightful Russian publication called Snob. Unfortunately, I can’t read Russian but it sounds great unless everyone’s lying to me.

And that is that. What I haven’t done and I hate that I haven’t done it, is actually seen most of you. This, I know, must change. Digital communication is nice and all but it doesn’t hold a candle to shared laughter, knowing smiles, camaraderie and support.

Cheers.