Tag Archives: SXSW Interactive

SXSW Panel on Local Blogging – We Need Your Vote!

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!

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. Share – Please help us spread the word by sharing the link to the Local Legit panel on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.


Ideas Wanted – Local Blogging

sxsw philanthropy panel

Image by Dan Patterson via Flickr

I am working on some ideas for a presentation or panel discussion around local blogging to submit to the SXSW Interactive Festival for 2012.  SXSW (South By Southwest) is an anual music festival in Austin, TX.  There is now an interactive festival that takes place at the Austin Convetion center before the music festival.  SXSW allows the community to submit ideas for panels and presentations for the festival each year.

I have been amazed, impressed and fascinated by the community that has formed around blogging in Pittsburgh.  Lots of people are sharing great ideas, working on projects and doing good things for Pittsburgh – all because of blogging.

Last night I attended the Artist Meet Up at Assemble – a great new community space for arts + technology, that has recently opened on Penn Ave.  There was an interesting conversation around internet and specifically blogging as a tool to promote and connect artists to audiences.  I thought it was really fascinating to see how different people use blogs to find information about a community.

What would you like to know about local blogging? What panel would you be interested in seeing on local blogs if you were to attend SXSW or Podcamp Pittsburgh? Please share questions, thoughts, ideas in the comments below!