Ken McCarthy

McCarthy has also worked with challenged communities — Hudson, New York and New Orleans, Louisiana — to develop strategies to use the web to organize citizens and engage in public education and outreach. His work in Hudson resulted in the defeat of a plan to build what would have been North America's largest coal fired cement plant on the banks of the Hudson River.

The name McCarthy gave to his own investigative efforts — "Brasscheck" — came from a book by Upton Sinclair about which George Seldes commented: "In 1920, Upton Sinclair, an outsider to journalism, wrote The Brass Check, the first book exposing the press. It was this book, plus a friendship with the author lasting many years, that influenced me and the books I wrote on the press, beginning in the 1930s."

BrasscheckTV features videos on a wide range of contemporary topics, available via e-mail subscription. Ken McCarthy has been an advocate of alternative media. He is quoted in an interview on July 9, 2007, with Wes Unruh, of Alterati.com, describing traditional news reporting as "so incredibly inept," and asserting that "...for that small percentage of people that really wants to know, the Internet's been a blessing and I think it will be very persistent."

Since 2006, McCarthy has worked with Levees.org, the New Orleans-based organization dedicated to ensuring that New Orleans' levees are rebuilt correctly and that levees in other parts of the country with similar engineering flaws are tended to and repaired.

In 2005, inspired by the launches of YouTube and Google Video, McCarthy began an online publication on Internet video called The System Video Blog. In this publication, McCarthy tracked the development of the Internet video industry and reported on his own experiments in Internet video publishing.

Projects that came out of that conference include one of the first detailed studies of an election fraud to appear in any medium (the 1997 49er Stadium bond issue in San Francisco); a virtual museum dedicated to recovering the forgotten story of one of San Francisco's most historically important neighborhoods (the Fillmore); and documentation of the largest and most successful maritime evacuation in history (New York City on September 11, 2001.)

In 1999, McCarthy collaborated with filmmaker Rick Goldsmith to create an online archive of the work of American investigative journalist George Seldes (1890–1995) in support of Goldsmith's Academy Award-nominated film Tell the Truth and Run: George Seldes and the American Press.

In 1998, he sold his company E-Media (a term he coined and for which he owned the federal trademark) to an investment group which rolled it up into Nine Systems, which in turn was absorbed by Akamai Technologies. He remains active in the Internet industry as an advisor, investor and entrepreneur operating under the name Amacord, Inc.

He worked as a consultant to NEC's Biglobe, Japan's largest online service, from 1996 to 2001. He wrote the first book on Internet entrepreneurship published in Japan: The Internet Business Manual.

In 1995, McCarthy organized and sponsored a conference on the topic of using the web as a local publishing medium to assist community building.

In 1994, he organized and sponsored the first conference ever held on potential commercial applications of the World Wide Web. Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape and developer of the first commercially successful Web browser, was the keynote speaker. Other Internet pioneers who acknowledge the impact McCarthy's ideas had on their own work include Ed Niehaus, Rick Boyce, and Steve O'Keefe. In a talk at Pacific Bell in 1994, McCarthy described in detail the new content marketing and distribution model the Internet was making possible, a model now sometimes referred to as The Long Tail.

In the summer of 1994, McCarthy commissioned Hank Duderstadt, then head of the Video SIG for the San Francisco chapter of the International Interactive Communications Society (IICS), to write a cover story for the Internet Gazette on the potential of streaming video on the Internet.

McCarthy is best known for his pioneering work in the movement to commercialize the Internet in the first part of the 1990s, including early experiments with legitimate e-mail advertising, contributions to the development of the banner ad, practical applications of pay-per-click advertising and Internet video. He is credited in Time magazine with originating the idea of using click-through rates as the key metric of website performance.

In the 1980s, while still in his twenties, he guest lectured at the business schools of Columbia University, MIT and New York University as part of a project called Optimal Learning which was based on practical applications of his academic studies in psychology and neuroscience at Princeton University.

McCarthy graduated from Regis High School in Manhattan in 1977 and Princeton University in 1981. At Princeton he hosted a jazz program for WPRB-FM. While at university and immediately afterwards, he produced numerous concerts including several for his college roommate, multi-Grammy nominee Stanley Jordan. His studies at Princeton included neuroscience, cognitive psychology and anthropology.

Ken McCarthy (born September 20, 1959) is an American activist, educator, entrepreneur and Internet commercialization pioneer.

McCarthy's maternal grandfather, Andrew Paretti of the Bronx, New York, was the pre-eminent granite masonry contractor in the New York City area from 1936 to 1955. His firm did the stone work for the chapel at West Point, Keating Hall at Fordham University, and the Peace Plaza of the United Nations, as well as numerous public works projects during the Robert Moses era.

Born in New Haven, Connecticut, McCarthy's father Francis W. McCarthy (1922–2003) was a pioneer in the practical applications of data processing technology for the insurance industry.