Welcome to the Joe Cappo website. After all of these years of communicating via the traditional media, I have gone digital. It is not easy for someone born and raised on print to go digital. That is the major reason newspapers are suffering so much. However, I am on Facebook and Linked In, although their value to me is marginal. I was on Twitter for a while until some jerk started sending out tweets under me name...so I ended that experiment.    

      But here I am, and I welcome any questions, queries or complaints. My e-mail address and other coordinates are listed on the contact page.

"What do I do?" you ask.  I write. I speak. I teach.

    To bring you up to date, since I ended my 25-year run at Crain Communications I work in a less structured format. I have been doing a considerable amount of public speaking and conference work including several seminars for Heartland International, lecturing editorial or advertising practitioners from Moldova, Ukraine and other Eastern European countries. I spoke at the 2007 AdAsia conference on Jeju Island, South Korea, and in October, 2009, I was keynote speaker at the 40th anniversary meeting of the Industrial Advertising Association of Japan at United Nations University in Tokyo.

      My most recent book, “The Future of Advertising: New Media, New Clients, New Consumers in the Post-Television Age,” is still selling well and is being used as a text or required reading at several universities. McGraw-Hill has published a paperback version of the book and it is also available in Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Chinese, Korean and Bosnian.

      My primary involvement right now is with my alma mater, DePaul University, where I serve on the advisory committees of the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences and the College of Communication. I also teach graduate journalism and advertising at the university. My advertising book is the text for the course, Advertising: Past Present and Future, which is offered every other year.  In the winter 2010 quarter I will teach News Media and Advertising 2015, a journalism/advertising course that will deal with developing business models for news media. In the spring, I will teach a graduate journalism course, Opinion and Column Writing.

     Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, you can see the level of professional work DePaul students can turn out. Check out my class blog at www.cappo.edublogs.org. This features the work turned in by students the last time I taught this course.

       I actually enjoy the academic experience now as much as I did as a student. I can heartily recommend it to any professional who has free time and wants to share his or her experience with the next generation.

      Among other things, I continue to do volunteer work for several organizations including the 109-year-old Off the Street Club.

       Top of mind right now, of course, is the rapidly roiling state of the media business. This is the most transformational set of circumstances I have witnessed since the introduction of television 60 years ago. Print is suffering badly, not only because of the recesssion, but also because of the evolution of communication.  Advertising in all of the traditional measured media has taken a dive, and is not likely to return to its former level. More than that, journalism itself is in trouble because the economic basis on which it has existed for more than century has eroded.

     There must be answers to that challenge. We are looking for them. We will find them.