Quality in Custom Media

Maintaining quality in a corner-cutting world and a do-more-with-less media environment.

The Tao of Quality (Or, What I learned from Auto-Tune)

April 5, 2011 Innovation Plus Opinion

If you’ve heard any pop music at all over the past several years, you’ve probably heard Auto-Tune, seasoning and sometimes overwhelming the performances of the gifted and mediocre alike. It forces sounds to conform to a particular musical key, eliminating the hundreds of deviant microtones that distinguish the human vocal instrument—which may be why digitally […]

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How to Lose Credibility with One Typoe

March 1, 2011 Content Creation

It seems like common sense: Look over your work before you share it. But sometimes – especially in the era of “do more with less” – that simply doesn’t happen. In the name of timesaving, we skip the review and let it fly. We hit “send” or “submit” or “publish” without giving work a once-over […]

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The Quality Mixtape: 20 Web Resources for Content Creation

February 15, 2011 Content Creation

Some of my most memorable musical discoveries were made thanks to meticulously compiled and lovingly decorated mixtapes, created for me by friends with the eclectic tastes and artistic fervor of adolescence. I know I’ve just utterly and irrevocably dated myself, but I don’t care; just thinking about those tapes makes me happy, reminds me that […]

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The Year of Living Quality

December 30, 2010 Innovation Plus Opinion

2010 is a droplet trembling on the rim of space-time, and I think I’m ready for it to fall. This is the one time of year that I feel justified in reviewing the preceding 12 months and asking navel-gazing questions about accomplishments, miracles, snafus and “I’d-better-not-let-that-happen-again” craziness. It’s an arguably cerebral manifestation of our chronobiological […]

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That’s a Fact

August 11, 2010 Content Management

“Did you hear what some flight attendant in New York did?” From offices to college campuses to airports, it seems everyone was talking this week about Steven Slater—the JetBlue flight attendant who had just about enough with one rude passenger. After getting hit on the head with a piece of luggage and cursed at, he […]

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The Quality Hustle

July 1, 2010 Content Creation

Fast, cheap, good: pick two. You may have heard the adage, and it makes lots of sense applied to the world of media. We’ve already examined the exigencies of fast and relished the comforting ripples good can generate… but can cheap ever fit in with a quality ethos?

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The Couch Whisperers

May 25, 2010 Innovation Plus Opinion

Remember the cozy, protected feeling that came with barricading your little-kid self inside a homemade fort? So do the architects at Build LLC, a firm in Seattle, Wash., who analyzed a selection of couch-based battlements. Besides catapulting me back to a long-ago basement rec room where I “fortified” a couple of low-slung, eggshell-hued sofas with […]

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Quality Is Love

April 15, 2010 Innovation Plus Opinion

Somewhere in the world, right now, there’s a robot folding hankies. Seriously. Take a look at it. OK, they’re not really hankies; rather, “rectangular pieces of cloth.” But, just focus for a moment on the the geek-love expressed by the title of the accompanying post (“Adorable Laundry-Folding Robot Gives Your Towels Fastidious Attention”). The robot […]

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Is There a Future for Quality in Media?

April 13, 2010 Quality

Does this very question set me up as a nostalgia-sodden, elitist Luddite? Of course I don’t think so: I believe that there can be no high art without low. I even realize that my use of “high” and “low” smacks of my own convenient and possibly specious value judgments. But it seems indisputable that the […]

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