NewCo Shift: Covering What’s Next?

John Battelle at the Web 2.0 Conference 2005
Credit: James Duncan Davidson/O’Reilly Media, Inc. 
Used under the CC 2.0 license.

In 2006 I had a brief conversation with John Batelle out at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. Batelle, a serial entrepreneur, author and journalist, has been at the forefront of many future directions and I think he’s on to something once again.

We’ve all seen the obvious shifts that have occurred since the internet became a commercial reality and other forces that have been accelerating now that the world is increasingly connected. News is instant so local TV news, daily newspapers, magazines, and radio are struggling so much we can hear the death rattles.

Communicating with one another is easier than it’s ever been. We can see, read, hear and experience new developments and innovation as fast as those electrons move through internet ‘pipes’ (and even though the entire internet weighs only as much as a strawberry).

That communication capability means that the time for new developments and innovation to occur continues to compress. What used to take months or years now happen in days or weeks.

But it’s not just communications capability. It’s also the push for not just profits, but for making a positive impact on the world, to be sustainable, to bring meaning and purpose to work, and to make capitalism leap to the next level of impact globally. (See this, this, this, this and this to see what I mean).

Technological developments and innovations are now so mainstream that they’ve faded into the background and are expected (my running joke, when people knock an Apple or Tesla announcement as not being BIG ENOUGH is that “…they didn’t introduce a holodeck or replicator so people were disappointed“).

NewCo Shift
Batelle has an insightful post The Tech Story is Over which discusses how mainstream tech has become and argues that:

I think the answer lies in the reinvention of capitalism. We’re on the brink of an entirely new approach to business, one built on shared principles of integrity, transparency, and sustainability. If we succeed, the world could become a far better place.

What I didn’t know was that Batelle had a larger vision to create a curated site of deep thinking surrounding this premise called NewCo Shift:

We’re thrilled to debut NewCo Shift on the new Medium for Publishers platform today. If you haven’t heard of us yet, NewCo Shift is a multi-channel business publication, with a central home right here on Medium (if you want to learn more, you can read this overview). We’ll be publishing on a weekly and daily cadence, and interacting with the tens of thousands of readers and followers who care about the largest shift in our economy since the industrial revolution.

Batelle’s not the first one to come up with this premise but Batelle is uniquely plugged in, has the track record to deliver a world-class product, and knows how to build buzz. It will be interesting to see how this might become the WIRED magazine of the next decade or two: a publication everyone reads because not doing so means you’re out-of-the-loop.