Mainstream media mainly absent at SXSWi

AUSTIN, Texas--Given that South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) attracts many of the biggest names in interactive technology, you would think that there would be tons of media on hand.

And indeed, many of the leading tech bloggers were here in force, live-blogging and making sure word of the event's happenings were spread far and wide.

But where was the coverage from the mainstream media? Other than CNET News.com, Wired, the San Francisco Chronicle and one or two other regional outlets, stories from most of the big traditional media publications were nowhere to be seen. No New York Times, no Wall Street Journal, no Washington Post, no Time, and so on.

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To be sure, many of those publications will almost certainly cover the music side of the festival, but it seems that the interactive side is just not at all well understood.

Over some food Wednesday, I was talking with San Francisco Chronicle reporter Dan Fost about the curious lack of major media at the interactive festival. And we couldn't really figure it out.

But a comment made to me over instant message by an editor at a major business publication provided a clue.

It's "not really our kind of thing," the editor told me. "It's games and music, right?"

And of course, games and music are both elements of the larger conference. But SXSWi is about so much more--Wikipedia, Google, Yahoo, Six Apart, Electronic Arts, the Internet Archive and so many companies and institutions are on hand at the Interactive festival.

But the business editor I talked to put a point on it: SXSWi doesn't do much to market itself to the press at large. The main SXSW Web site puts much more focus on the film and music festivals. So it's not clear, perhaps, to mainstream editors why they would benefit from sending folks to SXSWi.

But the editor also told me, after I explained to him what the event was about, that he will likely attend next year. So maybe it's just a word of mouth thing.