Media Channel

Veronica2

(My photo of a photog taking a photo of interviewer Veronica Belmont being interviewed by Brian Tong)

During a panel this week on whether to quit your job and
pursue video blogging professionally, one audience member approached
the microphone to ask a question.

Or was he an audience member?

The guy had a video camera and was pointing it at himself as he spoke:

“What advice do you have for aspiring video bloggers?” he asked.

“What’s your name?” asked panelist Lindsay Campbell of the online news show MobLogic.tv.

“Brian Agosta dot com,” answered the questioner, Brian Agosta.

“Yeah,” Campbell deadpanned, her main piece of advice nicely illustrated: “Promote yourself.”

This little scene captured a broader theme of South by Southwest
Interactive, the portion of the festival here devoted to the
neck-snappingly high-growth area of new media and online culture.

In the halls of the Austin Convention Center, you couldn’t take three
steps without tripping over a blogger, “vlogger,” podcaster or online
TV show host of some kind. There was so much recording, photo snapping
and keyboard tapping that anyone who wasn’t wielding a gadget looked
just plain weird.

“Everyone’s a maker,” said Veronica Belmont, the host of Mahalo Daily,
a video podcast for techies, in reference to the number of conference
attendees who were also covering the event — or rather, the small
number who weren’t.

“It happens so often where we get bloggers interviewing bloggers,” she said. “It’s extremely meta.”

Within a few minutes of leaving the auditorium where she had moderated
her own panel, Belmont was waylaid by two different interviewers, video
cameras at the ready. One was Brian Tong of the online tech-news
network CNet TV. The second guy was . . . well, Belmont wasn’t sure.

But whatever, right? The more, the merrier. In fact, Belmont explained,
the benefit of exhaustive mutual coverage makes sense if you consider
the way websites become popular on the Internet: In essence, the more
references to your site out there, the more visible it becomes.

“That whole premise kind of transfers into personal interactions,” said
Belmont. “Like, ‘Oh, there’s so-and-so, I’m going to go interview them,
so hopefully then they’ll mention me on their blog, thus elevating my
status as a blogger.’ “

And status is key to success in a media environment where anyone with a
camera and a wi-fi connection can be a walking media outlet. The
problem that today’s media aspirants face has less to do with getting
published than with getting noticed.

Megan Adams, a press coordinator for “South By” — as the veterans call
it — said last year’s interactive conference had 100 registered press
members. But in a survey sent to more than 6,000 attendees, 937 people
referred to themselves as media. And, Adams said, there were twice as
many registered press members this year. We’ll have to wait for the
survey to see whether the number of unofficial press doubled too. But
no one’s going to be surprised if it does.

In the tech world, standing out in a sea of media makers has become a
key art form. The people that succeed are part reporter, part performer
and part networker. In other words, get the story, infuse it with your
persona and make sure everyone who’s anyone knows about it when you’re
done.

The idea of so-called Internet fame frequently comes up in discussions
here — there was even a panel devoted to exploring what it means to be
an online celebrity. More than a few well-known bloggers showed up to
discuss the meaning of “microcelebrity” — commanding a loyal following
among a narrow group of people — with moderator Alice Marwick, who
studies status in social media at New York University. (The idea that
Internet celebrities would attend a panel that attempted to hash out
what Internet celebrity means speaks to the fuzzy definition of the
subject.)

Among the ideas that emerged from the discussion were that traditional
fame is a one-way proposition, whereas Web fame depends on an
interaction between the celebrity and his or her fans.

But not everyone is sold on this new style of proactive,
personality-centric media. Megan McCarthy, a staff writer at Wired.com
who covered the festival, said she preferred to avoid the spotlight and
just concentrate on the journalism.

“I think there are people who are not only trying to report the story but who want to become the story,” she said.

And indeed, the conference’s most talked about event was a keynote
interview with tech-world rock star Mark Zuckerberg, the 23-year-old
founder of Facebook. But it was his interviewer, BusinessWeek columnist
Sarah Lacy, who ended up nabbing the headlines.

In an imperfectly calibrated bid to give the interview a personal tone,
Lacy repeatedly took jabs at Zuckerberg, including references to his
young age, a nervous tic of his and how he’d once been so uncomfortable
during an interview that he’d “sweated through his shirt.”

During a tangent in which Lacy interrupted the talk to pick out a
friend in the thousand-person audience who’d been hanging out with her
and Zuckerberg the night before, a heckler yelled:

“Talk about something interesting!”

The crowd, clearly unsatisfied with the interview to that point,
erupted in applause, and Lacy was on the defensive for the rest of the
interview.

“Can someone send me a message later about why exactly it was that I sucked so bad?” she said to the room.

“What’s your e-mail address?” someone replied.

david.sarno@latimes.com

– by Web Scout