Frank Rose

Frank Rose is the leader of the Columbia Digital Storytelling Lab and the author of The Art of Immersion.

BIO
Frank Rose started out as a magazine journalist and author of narrative nonfiction books. He has worked as a public speaker, essayist, book reviewer (primarily for The Wall Street Journal) and academic, primarily focusing on the future of media.

He is currently leading the Strategic Storytelling seminar at Columbia and has launched the Digital Dozen/Breakthroughs in Storytelling Awards at the Columbia Digital Storytelling Lab.

FOCUS

Frank Rose is a recognized authority on the future of media. In his most recent book, The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories, he argues that we are seeing the emergence of a new form of narrative that is native to the Internet in the same way the novel is native to print. Told through many media at once, these new narratives encourage us not merely to watch but to participate and to immerse ourselves, taking us deeper than an hour-long TV drama or a two-hour movie or a 30-second spot will permit. And they frequently blur boundaries that long seemed inviolate—between author and audience, story and game, content and marketing, fiction and reality.

Rose has explored this theme as a keynote speaker at marketing summits and film festivals worldwide, in academic gatherings in the US and Europe, and in talks at such companies as Google, Lucasfilm, Unilever, and the BBC. A senior fellow at the Columbia University School of the Arts, he is faculty co-director with Paul Woolmington of its executive seminar in digital storytelling strategy, co-sponsored by Columbia Business School, as well as a frequent contributor to The New York Times and other publications.

Previously, as a contributing editor at Wired and a contributing writer at Fortune before that, Rose worked as a journalist at the intersection of media and technology, covering such stories as Samsung and the rise of the South Korean techno-state and the posthumous career of Philip K. Dick in Hollywood. He has also worked as a contributing editor at Esquire and Travel + Leisure and has written for such publications as The Atlantic, New York, the Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, and Vanity Fair. Among his earlier books are The Agency, an unauthorized account of the rise and near-collapse of what was once the leading talent agency in Hollywood, and the 1989 best-seller West of Eden, which detailed the ouster of Steve Jobs from Apple and was named one of the ten best business books of the year by Business Week.

LINKS
Strategic Storytelling Frank Rose at Columbia Digital Dozen biography Art of Immersion

Interviews: econsultancy Borsen J. Walter Thompson Intelligence Henry Jenkins