Casino Enterprise Management

Back in 1976 I took my first job in the publishing world at the youthful age of 16. It was a summertime position working in the mailroom of a large international textile trade association in St. Paul. Eight magazines were produced there each month, but they were laid out manually with film and tape. It was very manual and a labor intensive process. There wasn’t any desktop publishing in those days. The closest things to a computer in that office were a few electric typewriters that were closely guarded by the executive secretaries who operated them. Facsimile machines hadn’t even made the rounds yet. Multi-button phone systems and large file cabinets were as about as technical as it got. That was 32 years ago this summer, and a lot has changed.

By the time I graduated college in 1986 I was on my second personal computer. I was very proud of my Gateway 386DX 40 megabyte hard drive and color monitor. Quark Express was also on the scene and was dramatically changing the publishing world through computer automated pagination. Wide Area Networks made websites possible, but they were all pretty gnarly in the early days. Still, for those who embraced technology there was the sense that this Internet thing was going to rapidly change the world we live and work in.

Just last year I would have to say the capabilities of new media had been mostly subtle refinement of existing technology. That has kept many publishers and media executives skeptical. New technologies don’t offer anyone very much until they are widely adopted. Anyone in publishing worth their weight in salt has known that new media would eventually overtake traditional publishing, but the people in the newspaper and magazine businesses weren’t quick to adopt these new technologies. This would have meant adopting entirely new business strategies. There was also a technology resistant old guard that flat-out didn’t want things to change. I’m sure that attitude of everything seem to be working just swell is yielding to a lot of regret.

With the current global recession bringing many publishing houses and newspapers to their knees, if not simply out of business, the necessity for a content delivery paradigm shift has finally come to be. New technologies don’t offer anyone very much until they are widely adopted, but our youth has really been on the cutting edge of new technologies and for more than a decade. For them it’s more than a capability, it’s a passion—maybe even a necessity. They were first to understand that new technologies enhanced just about everything they do, including business communication and networking. And this is a critical point to understand for it is the youth of today who will manage, run and control the businesses of tomorrow. 

Today, technology has brought sophistication to mainstay tools that we all use for research, marketing, communication, social interaction, entertainment and transactions of all types. Websites aren’t a big deal, but what they can do is. For me, a business-to-business publisher serving the commercial casino industry, the time for the transition to media experiences is now.

That’s why I invite you to experience our new media platform at www.CasinoEnterpriseManagement.com.

Here, I have tried to deliver a whole host of exciting new offerings to you. Please check it out and tell me if I have succeeded in what I set out to do.

Peter E. Mead
Publisher, Casino Enterprise Management