Last week we posted a link to David Carr's New York Times piece about SXSW.
Every day at the South by Southwest conference in Austin last week, I would leave my hotel room for events, and at each door in the hall, there would be various copies of complimentary newspapers. For the whole week, none of them, ever, seemed to be picked up. Over the course of a few days, as the Web and film conference gave way to the music festival, the papers sat, still as gravestones and almost as ominous.
Curious, I hung in the hall and watched as the other people at the hotel, mostly younger, would leave their rooms, already staring into cellphones and PDAs — ignoring, or perhaps not even seeing, news they stepped over that was physically packaged and shipped many hours before.
They were riveted by news on the small screen, most of it up-to-the-minute and highly personal — a recommendation from a friend about a band or film to see, a blog post about a missed conference panel, or a feed of festival updates. Twitter, the text message application that came to prominence two years ago at the festival, was far and away the dominant news platform for the conference.
As a rule, these are not folks who want to know anything about yesterday, which is what most newspapers are about. Then again, these people would have never been thrown together were it not for, of all things, a newspaper.
The Austin Chronicle, a weekly newspaper as funky and idiosyncratic as the town it covers, continues to thrive with a relentlessly local news agenda — state government, the school board and the City Council, along with deep coverage of the arts — and a willingness to lead, as opposed to simply criticize, in artistic matters.
At a time when daily newspapers seem to be going away at the rate of one a week and weeklies are madly cutting to stay afloat, The Chronicle, which has revenue of approximately $8.5 million a year, has not laid off anyone, has no plans to do so, and its business is off just 7 percent in the last three years….
It's an old-school love kind of love. The newspaper's Web site, in spite of Austin's reputation as a tech-savvy place, has never been a particularly remarkable one and is still basically a companion to the print version, which is crammed with all manner of editorials, deep political coverage and lots of articles rendered in almost unreadable small type.
"We have a critical mass of culture, of government, of people who like to read, that makes this a good place to have a newspaper like ours." A cop walks by and high-fives Mr. Black, which is not the general relationship between most newspapers and local law enforcement, but The Chronicle's footprint is so deep here — millions and millions of dollars are flowing into the city this week — that people generally think that what's good for The Chronicle is good for the community and vice versa.
It was getting on toward 11 p.m., which is high noon during the days of the festival, and Mr. Black dropped me at a club. I watched him walk down the street and he couldn't get three steps without someone stopping him to say hello or tell him thanks. Imagine that: a newspaper man being one of the most popular guys in town.