The Entertainment Technology Center at USC launched ETCentric in March of 2011 as a news and commentary forum designed to provide our community members with the most vital information impacting media and entertainment. Over the years we experimented with a variety of delivery methods, eventually settling upon an online portal and associated daily email alert, teamed with a social media presence, highlights of ETC projects, and live reporting from key industry events. While it has been our great pleasure to provide this service to our valued members, we now find ourselves in a different era, one that features a much wider collection of targeted news services and social media tools that serve similar objectives. With that in mind — and as a key part of our larger initiative to refocus information-sharing on ETC projects — we have decided to shutter ETCentric and The Daily News Brief in their current forms and launch a new, more dynamic ETC website in January. The final day for ETCentric will be Friday, December 12.

ETCentric began as a summary source of news, trends, and perspective at a time when website hard coding was the norm and simple-to-use publishing tools were still emerging. Our service, catering to a unique audience, became one of the first to digest industry-related “Top Stories” in a curated online format for quick reads, reference additional articles in “Also Noted” and “More News” sections, and provide a snapshot of “Upcoming Events” — while experimenting with a variety of delivery models involving email, mobile apps, and social tools.

Over time, this format was adopted by numerous companies, industries, and audiences — and today, you can see the success of similar approaches and models nearly everywhere. We are very proud to have served as part of the first wave in this space, especially considering our rather small team that worked tirelessly to maintain a daily publishing schedule.

ETC staffers have served as writers, researchers, designers, and technicians over the years, while our community members have often served as contributors. We were honored to have two of the entertainment industry’s respected technology journalists, Debra Kaufman (2005-2020) and Paula Parisi (2020-2025) as our primary writers. We also employed a collection of hard-working, enthusiastic USC students from the School of Cinematic Arts and the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. And along with our main article researcher Dennis Kuba (formerly of Disney), we delivered nearly 17,000 articles and reports.

We want to thank the staff, past and present, for their unwavering dedication scouring news sources, writing article summaries, creating original content, and editing the brief that included access to 35+ news items every weekday.

Next, we are looking for new and compelling ways to continue providing M&E thought leaders with information vital for moving the industry forward. This initiative will begin with a new, more flexible and dynamic ETC website for sharing project updates and perspective regarding tech news and trends. To continue ETC’s tradition of experimentation, our plans include a focus on emerging social platforms, AI tools, and video models.

We thank our subscribers for their loyalty, contributions, and help in making ETCentric a success, while we look forward to the next exciting chapter in knowledge-sharing and fostering innovation. That chapter begins in January, as always, with the guidance and helpful feedback of our members.

Happy holidays to all.

Edie Meadows, Chief Administrative Officer
Rob Scott, Managing Editor