What Am I Listening To, Reading And Watching During The Holidays?

Happy holidays and welcome to new subscribers! ??

I thought I'd share content that's recently caught my ear, eye and mind. The holidays have given me the opportunity to consume more content than usual and I've been taking advantage of that.

How to Think About Marketing Right Now

End of year can be a stressful time for marketers. We assess whether we met our goals this year, then figure out how to exceed those goals next year. We're often left asking "why didn't we do enough this year" and "how can we possibly do more next year"?

Robert Rose at Content Marketing Institute (CMI) urges us to put a different lens on things.

Robert writes:

"But what if you viewed this period differently? Instead of seeing the end of the year as a source of stress, what if you embraced it as a natural pause — a valuable opportunity for strategic recalibration? A pause for a new beginning."

Robert shares five steps to consider:

1. Embrace unfinished business
2. Find peace in the uncomfortable
3. Reframe uncertainty as potential
4. Invest in relationships
5. Focus on the present

Read Robert's post at CMI: https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/articles/beat-uncertainty-success/

What Rights Do We Hold After Death?

After death, celebrities' rights include right of publicity, copyright and trademark. AI introduces a whole slew of considerations that didn't exist before. If you have family members pursuing law degrees, this might be an area of specialization to consider.

Fascinating episode of "The Town with Matthew Belloni" (podcast):

How to Find New Audiences

Loved this interview about how New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie uses TikTok to experiment with content formats and find new audiences. Some excerpts I found interesting:

• "The New York Times obviously has a broad reach, but that reach is concentrated among a relatively narrow slice of people ... I thought it was valuable to try to cultivate another kind of audience that maybe engages with my work in a different way."
• "For me, writing is part of how I just process things, and so even if I were convinced that no one was reading it, I would still be writing."
• "And I think audiences want at least something that appears to be authentic. They want something that seems like they’re getting almost something personal."

Read the interview: https://slate.com/life/2024/12/tiktok-videos-new-york-times-politics-jamelle-bouie.html

Documentaries from FRONTLINE

While I plan to catch Squid Game 2 on Netflix this week, the thing I like to stream the most is documentaries. I recently discovered the on-demand library for FRONTLINE, a documentary program from PBS.

On this site, the documentaries range from 50 minutes to two hours. They're ad-free and outstanding. I've become a big fan of Michael Kirk, a writer and documentary filmmaker who's behind many of these programs.

PBS just published "2024’s 10 Most-Streamed New FRONTLINE Documentaries."

I'm currently watching "Two American Families: 1991-2024."

Best Podcasts of 2024

Writer?Marnie Shure shared her list of the 20 best podcasts of 2024 at The Atlantic. I picked six from this list of 20 and plan to listen to them over the holidays:

(Links to go the Apple Podcasts listing.)

1. Fur & Loathing
2. Ripple
3. Inheriting
4. Shell Game
5. Road to Rickwood
6. In The Dark

The Atlantic is a subscription site -- if your access to this article is blocked by a paywall, let me know and I'll share details for all 20 podcasts.

An Interview About Community

I was interviewed by Ian Truscott on the Rockstar CMO podcast. We spoke about the Bay Area Content Marketing Meetup and my involvement with the Content Marketing Institute community. Later in the episode Robert Rose joined Ian and spoke about the Rose-Colored Glasses article that I reference above.

Listen to the episode here: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/249-dennis-community-robert-moving-slow-fixing-stuff-episode-tryze

2025, Bring It

I'm excited to see what 2025 brings. Want to catch up? Drop me a comment or DM and let's get a chat on the calendar. Thanks for reading this far.