Jorge Cauz
Jorge Cauz is an
American businessman and the president of
Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., the publishers of the
Encyclopædia Britannica, a position which he was appointed to in November 2003.
Cauz is a graduate of the Kellogg Graduate School of Management of
Northwestern University, and prior to joining
Britannica, served as a management consultant for
Andersen Consulting and A.T. Kearney.
Cauz was hired by
Britannica as a consultant in 1996, and then would later serve a variety of executive positions (including senior vice president of international operations, and
chief operating officer of Internet operations) prior to his appointment as president. During that time, he played a key role in the company's marketing strategies, including the publication of all-digital editions of the
Encyclopædia Britannica.
[http://corporate.britannica.com/press/releases/cauz.html Encyclopædia Britannica News Releases: Jorge Cauz named president of Encyclopædia Britannica]One of the key aspects of Cauz's tenure is the emergence of the
Internet as both an opportunity and a threat in the
encyclopedia business. In a 2000 interview, Cauz marked that in an Internet-dominated market, "you have to be free to be relevant".
[http://mindframe-ie.com/dotcom.html How Dot-Communism Is Driving Encyclopedia Britannica Out Of Business] Britannica has, in that time, introduced a free (albeit abridged) online version of the encyclopedia, as well as online subscriptions for readers willing to pay for unabridged content.
Britannica and Wikipedia
During Cauz's tenure, officials from
Britannica have become outspoken in their
criticism of the freely-editable online encyclopedia
Wikipedia, a reference work which is now the world's largest encyclopedia (in terms of articles), and which many (including critics) view as a significant competitive threat to
Britannica, a threat which Cauz has downplayed.
In
July 2006, Cauz personally entered the fray in an interview in
New Yorker Magazine, in which he stated that Wikipedia had "decline(d) into a hulking, mediocre mass of uneven, unreliable, and, many times, unreadable articles" and that "Wikipedia is to Britannica as
American Idol is to the
Juilliard School."
.
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Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition*
Images from Encyclopædia Britannica
