March 16, 2009

SXSW Dispatch: Email Is for Old People

Photo by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/laughingsquid/">Scott Beale of Laughing Squid</a>

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Sheerly Avni is a film and culture writer guest-blogging for Mother Jones from Austin’s South by Southwest Festival.

Part One: Email Is for Old People

In a fit of pathological optimism, I opted to register for both the Interactive and Film portions of SXSW. This is like deciding to “do” both Italy and France on a five-day trip to Europe: Vertigo-inducing and ill-advised, though possible if you forgo sleep. Forgoing sleep in Austin has been easy; my hotel walls, more than three blocks away from the musical epicenter, were booming in time to the bass beat until well past 2 a.m.

And now I also have insomnia. Because not until I started passing out my spiffy new business cards in the SXSW pressroom did I discover that, despite living in San Francisco, having an iPhone, knowing some html, and maintaining a regular Facebook account, what a pathetically ass-backwards, last century, late-adopting, buzzword-clueless Internet rube I really am.

And, dear reader, or rather, user, or rather content-abuser, I hope you’re a rube too.

SXSW is all about the search for the new. New music, new filmmakers, and in tech, that new “killer app,” which will change everyone’s lives forever. The killer app of two years ago at SXSW was Twitter. The killer app of last year was also…. Twitter. And this year at SXSW, as I discovered while trading business cards with tech bloggers and entrepeneurs too polite to point it out (thanks, Grant!), not having a Twitter account printed on my card places me firmly on the dusty, musty side of ever-narrowing bandwidth between tomorrow and yesterday.

Email addresses are obsolete; give your Twitter handle instead? It took me a while to wrap my mind around the concept—long enough that by the time I’d built my new account, I’d found out that guess what, Twitter’s out now, too.

Like I said, vertigo.

In my next dispatch: Two films which premiered this weekend about what happens when it’s not your email address but your livelihood that’s become obsolete.

THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

payment methods

THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

payment methods

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