Frank Rose is a leading writer and speaker on digital culture. His most recent book, The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories, shows how entertainment and advertising are responding to overwhelming technological change. Sparked by his coverage of the shifting media world for Wired, it has been called "compelling" by the Guardian, "essential" by the International Journal of Advertising, and "a new media bible" by Rome's La Repubblica.
As a keynote speaker, Frank has described the rise of new forms of storytelling at conferences ranging from Sheffield Doc/Fest to the Guardian's Changing Media Summit to ad:tech Sydney. He has also appeared at South by Southwest, Ars Electronica, the Cannes Film Festival, and the Bay Area's Churchill Club. He has lectured at the film, business, and journalism schools at USC, Columbia, and NYU. He's addressed global marketing summits at companies like Timberland and Unilever and broader sessions at Google, Lucasfilm, and the BBC. (For details, please visit his speaker page.)
Frank's blog, Deep Media, covers new developments in advertising, entertainment, and storytelling and is ranked among the top marketing blogs in the US by Google. He sometimes lends his expertise to projects directly, as with his realization of Millennium Magazine for 42 Entertainment in connection with David Fincher's production of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
Frank is one of a small group of journalists who started writing about digital technology in the early 1980s. He'd gotten his start covering the punk scene at CBGB for The Village Voice, chronicling the emergence of Patti Smith, the Ramones, and Talking Heads. Subsequently, as a contributing editor at Esquire, he focused on emerging subcultures, from new wave in New York to Christian surfers in southern California to the burgeoning tech scene in Silicon Valley. He also wrote Into the Heart of the Mind, a national best-seller about the efforts of a group of A.I. researchers at Berkeley to give a computer common sense.
In his next book, West of Eden: The End of Innocence at Apple Computer, he chronicled the power struggle between Steve Jobs and John Sculley that ended with Jobs being expelled from the company. Now available in an updated edition, it became a national best-seller and was named one of the ten best business books of 1989 by BusinessWeek. He then turned his attention to Hollywood, becoming a contributing writer at Premiere and profiling such figures as Jeffrey Katzenberg (then president of Disney) and Tim Burton. A story on the sudden defection of the top motion picture agents at William Morris led to The Agency: William Morris and the Hidden History of Show Business, a multi-generational saga of loyalty and betrayal that the Los Angeles Times described as "like sitting in on a long, gossipy afternoon" at Hollywood's top country club.
After its publication he became a contributing writer at Fortune, focusing on Hollywood and the global media conglomerates that dominate it. He joined Wired as a contributing editor in 1999 and over the next 10 years covered such topics as the making of Avatar, Sony's enormous gamble on the PlayStation 3, Samsung and the rise of the Korean techno-state, and the posthumous career of Philip K. Dick in Hollywood. Of the four National Magazine Awards Wired has won for general excellence (in 1997, 2005, 2007, and 2009), his articles appeared in winning issues for three.
Frank's books have been translated into Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Korean. His essays and reporting have also appeared in The New York Times and The New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post Book World, The Atlantic, New York, Travel + Leisure (where he was a contributing editor in the late '90s), Vanity Fair, and Rolling Stone. A native of Virginia, he earned a journalism degree at Washington & Lee and has lived ever since in New York, with stints in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and Los Angeles.
