If you’d like to learn more about the 50+ market from a global perspective, you can tune into live streaming webcasts of The Silver Market Phenomenon symposium sessions live from Toyko this week. The symposium examines the growing 55-plus population globally, and considers why the market is still underdeveloped from a product a service standpoint. I contributed an article to the book looking at the impact of aging audiences on mass media in the U.S., chiefly newspapers. I’ll be discussing the article as part of a panel discussion the first morning of the symposium.

If you’re in the U.S. this is something of a night owl event due to the time zone changes. The conference takes place on Friday and Saturday, and gets underway Friday morning at 9:15AM Tokyo time. That’s 8:15pm Eastern time on Thursday in the U.S., so you can take it from there! The conference organizers advise that the sessions may also be archived for viewing later, so I’ll post that whenever the taped video becomes available.

If you would like to tune in live, the streaming video will be located here.

If you’re in the Tokyo area the first week of October, consider attending The Silver Market Phenomenon symposium, which will look at the challenges posed to business and societies by the global age wave. The symposium is tied to the publication of a book of the same name, which will be published in early September by Springer. The book is edited by Florian Kohlbacher of the German Institute for Japanese Studies in Tokyo and Cornelius Herstatt of the Technische Universität Hamburg-Harburg, in Hamburg.

The book examines at the growing 55-plus population globally, and considers why the market is still underdeveloped from a product a service standpoint. I contributed a chapter–which I’ll be presenting at the symposium–titled “The End of Mass Media: Aging and the U.S. Newspaper Industry.” The struggles of the newspaper business is one of my favorite topics, due mainly to my long, sorry history as an ink-stained wretch. The essay traces the importance of Boomers in mass media in the U.S., and how the newspaper industry has failed to grasp this audience’s ongoing importance as publishers struggle to make the transition to new digital platforms.

Other contributors you probably know include Chuck Nyren on the role of advertising agencies in marketing to boomers and Dick Stroud on the importance of Web 2.0 to Boomers.

If you’d like to learn more about the symposium, download the flier here [pdf file].