SXSW (South By Southwest) is an annual music festival held each March in Austin, Texas. In addition to music, SXSW hosts an interactive festival and a film festival. The programming for the interactive festivals is submitted and voted on by the community. The SXSW staff uses the community input to make the selections for panels and speakers for the upcoming festival.
For the 2012 SXSW Interactive festival we have submitted a panel on local blogging – Local Legit: Who Blogs Local Best? Thank you to everyone who has suggested themes, ideas and questions around the idea of local coverage. Here is a brief summary of the panel (read the full description here)
This panel will explore the idea of who covers local communities best, the rise of local blogging and the impact on those communities as well as what the local blogging landscape might look like in the future.
The Panelists – We have put together a great group of of panelist who can offer unique perspectives not only as bloggers, but also as journalists who have covered local topics. We are honored that each of these panelists has enthusiastically agreed to participate. This panel also has some geographic diversity to look at local blogging in large cities like New York and more regional cities like Pittsburgh.
Anthony De Rosa
- Co-founder of Neighborhoodr – city specific Tumblr blog network
- Social Media Editor at Thomson Reuters
- past speaker at SXSW
Kate Giammarise
- Co-Founder of Rust Wire – a blog about the industrial Midwest
- journalist covering the steel industry
- former newspaper reporter Chillicothe, Lorain and Toledo, Ohio
Angie Schmitt
- Co-Founder of Rust Wire – a blog about the industrial Midwest
- Manager of the Streetsblog.net – a consortium of more than 400 active transportation blogs
- former newspaper reporter
Erich Schwartzel
- reporter for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette who has been working on the PG’s Marcellus Shale blog – Pipeline.
- Pipeline combines community contributions with newsroom content to cover a story that’s rewiring much of Appalachia. Pipeline has been featured by the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard and was a Notable Entry in the 2011 Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism.
Help us take the conversation about local blogging to SXSW and beyond!
- Vote for Local Legit: Who Blogs Local Best in the SXSW panel picker before September 2, 2011. To vote you need to create an account, log-in and vote.
- Comment – join the conversataion. Have questions about local and blogging? What do you want this panel to address? Please add to the conversation in the comments section of the Local Legit panel on the SXSW panel picker website here.
- Share – Please help us spread the word by sharing the link to the Local Legit panel on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.
Last night I attended the 
