Tag: SXSW

Fest Rest
For about a month and a half, starting at the beginning of February and ending less than a week ago, my whole life was pretty much South by Southwest Interactive.

The festival takes place in Austin every year and for the last two has been growing at a rate of more than 35 percent, year-over-year. Like smartphones and apps, it’s become one of those things that only becomes a bigger and bigger part of my job. It’s not just a national tech story that publications like Wired, CNet, The New York Times and others pay attention to, it’s a local story for us. And as the lead reporter on it for my paper, I get really, really competitive and territorial about our coverage. It’s probably the only time of the year that this journalistic bug hits me, where I turn into one of those guys with the hat with “PRESS” on it and bark things out like, “You’re not gonna scoop me, ya out-of-towner, see?”

The “See?” is probably unnecessary.

But it really does take over my life for a good while. I turn down freelance assignments and other offers to do stuff with, “I can’t. South by Southwest.” We coordinate a schedule of babysitting help for my wife with the explainer, “South by Southwest.” When I go to get a bite to eat at a restaurant and they ask what I want, I say, “South by Southwest.” Then they bring me back a soggy sandwich and I wonder if perhaps I’ve gone too far.

What is the festival? I don’t really know anymore. It was once a funky, centralized festival for CD-ROM producers, digital artists and people dabbling in online porn (“dabbling” is a good word for that, don’t you think? It’s dirty-but-not-quite-dirty-sounding).

Today, it’s a massive social media event, a place where start-ups try to get a foothold with early adopters and a place where huge companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get their brands in front of bloggers, top Twitterers and the press.

For me, personally, it’s the hardest I work all year on any one project. It’s also the only time of the year I have a free pass to stay out as late as I want for a whole week and to really throw myself into coverage.

I won’t bore you with the play-by-play because I pretty much did that with Twitter for a whole week (and then some) to the point where I wondered if one more post with the hashtag “#SXSW” was finally going to drive my friends away for good.

I took last Thursday and Friday off after the fest and am scheduling some vacation time soon. You’ll see why below.

Here’s a lot of what I wrote in that blaze of pre-festival, mid-festival and post-festival activity.
- The Monday that the festival ran, I did a piece with NPR on trends at the fest. We recorded it via Skype from the press room of the Convention Center (which was much more convenient than going to the studio where we usually record).
- Before the fest, I did a profile of 4chan and Canvas founder Christopher Poole that ran in our Insight section and covered the actual keynote. I also profiled SCVNGR chief ninja (and founder) Seth Priebatsch, who ended up doing a great job on his keynote.
- On the Saturday of the fest, I had a story/essay run about so-called “Social Media Gurus” that featured a photo of me that all my editors found very amusing. I just tried very hard to avoid making eye contact with the photo. Overall, I thought it turned out really well. It’s a piece my editor and I have wanted to get into the paper for a while.
- I also wrote about the backlash against the festival in 2010 and how Interactive is dealing with growing pains and emerging as a huge social event. (2011 would eventually prove a lot of this even truer). I was surprised to see that piece pop up on Techmeme.
- A Tweet I posted about Apple’s surprise pop up store became a Twitter top Tweet, featured on the front page of Twitter.com! (It wasn’t even linking to a story I wrote. Our great real estate writer Shonda Novak covered that.)
- We covered a ton of panels, posted lots of photos and just did a lot of write-ups on the fest programming.
- Post-festival, I wrote about how it grew to more than 19k attendees and how SXSW Interactive can be fixed for 2012 (not that it’s broken).
- At the fest, I was in videos for Access PR and Gen Connect, being interviewed about SXSW Interactive.
- I created a Flickr set of some of my SXSW photos as well as the Statesman Texas Social Media Awards, where I was a judge. I’m still tweaking pics and putting more of them up.
- I shot a video of Trey Ratcliff’s amazing downtown Austin photowalk. Bonus was that I got to hang out with Jackie Danicki, a long-time Internet friend. You can also see a video I shot of an IBM Watson demo and a stand-up I did wrapping up the fest embedded below.
March 23, 2011
TED and then some

The makers of the ‘Livestrong Austin Marathon and Half-Marathon’ App. Photo by Jay Janner, Austin American-Statesman

This post is about a week overdue, but that’s probably a good thing because there’s a lot more to add. Last week, a “There’s a Creator for That” feature ran in the Statesman about the Livestrong Austin Marathon and Half-Marathon app (the marathon itself happened yesterday; I’m running a bit late).

I also had two more pieces in the paper that day, one about Google’s campaign to make its Places and Hotpot services take off in Austin for Tech Monday and the other a reverse-publish of a blog post I wrote about digitizing our old VHS tapes.

Last week, I hosted a live chat with organizers of South by Southwest Interactive and then wrote about Saturday’s TEDxAustin conference. I didn’t go last year, but this year we made the effort to attend and the Statesman was able to pay for my ticket. We did a pretty extensive preview of the event and today I posted a very lengthy wrap-up. Tried to explain not just TEDxAustin, but the whole TED phenomenon and why it’s taken off so quickly.

We weren’t allowed to bring laptops, digital cameras, video cameras or anything larger than a cell phone and even texting and Tweeting were discouraged during the speaking portions of the day. That made for an interesting reporting challenge since I’m so used to covering conferences live, but it also freed me up to really pay attention, take careful longhand notes and really think about what I thought of the event before I posted something two days later.

Right now things are in a weird balance between me being very much a homebody — I’m loving being here with the girls, taking them to the park, going to the local Children’s Museum, catching up on TV with my wife when they go to bed and playing video games or watching my own shows after everyone else is in bed.

But for TEDx, I had to spend an entire Saturday away from home; it was also the day after we went to Austin for a concert. As I left Saturday morning, Lilly followed me to the door and told me not to go. Carolina is old enough now to recognize when I’m here or when I’m gone and she’s been especially affectionate lately. The older they get the more I miss them when I’m not here and more valuable the time seems when I’m not off working. It’s made it a lot easier to turn down extraneous projects, unpaid speaking gigs and anything else that takes me out of the house when I’m needed.

But then tonight, I attended a Town Hall for SXSW Interactive and got home late. Carolina was asleep and Lilly was already curled in bed, waiting for me.

In just a few weeks I’m going to be gone 24/7 for practically an entire week. I wish I could say I’m completely pleased that the fest is growing and drawing more and more attention every year. It’s my home turf and I get very competitive covering the fest; I love that I’m usually in the top tier of reporters covering the event and rarely get scooped in mid-March. But I’m also a little resentful that Interactive is expanding in both directions, with pre- and post events that are stretching it from 5 days to at least 7 and as many as 11 depending on how we choose to cover it all. Four nights away from home are hard. Six I’ve never even tried before. I’m a little worried.

I’ll take time off after the fest and probably a day or two beforehand to make up for the long hours, but as my wife is fond of saying, I’m not 25 anymore.

I can’t deny, though, that at events like TEDx and SXSW, I love being around people. I love seeing friends who are in from out of town and people I only ever see online through Twitter or Facebook. I love staying out late and seeing people speak and having a few drinks and getting to process it all and put it back out there in writing.

Maybe it’s good that I have a job where I can compress nearly a year of that fun into about a week. It’s exhausting, but it’s also a lot of fun and maybe necessary given what the rest of the year is like.

February 21, 2011
Scoop McNewsboy

Just a short update on some stories that ran in the paper today. I’ve had a really good few days with a bunch of stories I’d been working on or planning for a while suddenly appearing all in a row this week.

On the front page I had a story run about how the gubernatorial candidates in Texas for the November election are using social media. This was a story that had been on our budget for a while and that I was dreading. Whenever I write anything to do with politics and technology I always promise myself not to let myself get pulled into doing that again. My dread continued as I reached out to the campaigns and found that they were so busy it was tough to schedule interviews and get the ball rolling.

But then the last two weeks before the stories were due, the interviews started happening and then, to my surprise, I was given access to the candidates themselves. The last week leading up to the story running got exciting and once I had all my interviews done I was suddenly thrilled to be writing it since I actually knew what I was talking about after all the reporting I’d done. It’s a nice place to be where you have much more information than you could possibly fit into a long story. Over the weekend some edits were made that condensed a chunk of the story; I wasn’t thrilled with that, but overall I’m happy with the way the whole piece turned out.

The other story I had in today’s paper was some news we broke about South by Southwest Interactive starting up a Texas education-themed conference next March called SXSWedu. Not sure if I’ll be covering that myself or if people on our newsrooms education will be doing that, but it’s nice that we got the story first.

The next few says I’ll be visiting the Game Developers Conference Online and doing a little coverage at the Austin City Limits Festival on some of the behind-the-scenes tech stuff being shown off and seeing if the cell networks hold up (something we end up having to check up on every year, it feels like).

October 4, 2010