Commentary
Phoning It In
- by Joe Mandese @mp_joemandese, March 12, 2015
I'm not suggesting you should judge a trade show by
its press room, but I was struck by the sight of a lone iconic object sitting on a table in the SXSW Interactive press "suite." I'm not sure if the event organizers placed it there
to be ironic, especially since it's red and looked like a Hollywood version of the White House-to-Kremlin hotline, but there it was in all its rosy glory: a landline telephone.
Equally ironic was the instruction sheet sitting next to it explaining how to use it.
Normally, this wouldn't have struck me, but this is an "interactive media" festival
of all-things-digital. And yes, it wasn't an analogue rotary phone, but it threw me back to the days of smoke-filled press rooms with reporters banging typewriter keys and feeding it into fax
machines.
Joe Mandese is the Editor in Chief of MediaPost. You can reach Joe at joe@mediapost.com.
