Multimedia Networking Strategy for Conferences

I'm going to the Personal Democracy Forum in NYC next week, and the more that I look at the line-up of A-List bloggers and other movers and shakers, the more I'm thinking that it would be a good idea to take along my GL-1 miniDV camera and shotgun & lapel microphones to some conduct some impromptu interviews with the panelists and conference participants.

So my networking strategy could be to interview some of the A-listers for my film and produce a short video piece to display my sensibility for videography and content. I've donned the photojournalist hat at a number of film festivals like Sundance and SXSW in order to network with the indy film world's big wigs, and it seems the fashionable thing to do these days.

Glenn Reynolds noted the proliferation of vloggers at BlogNashville, and predicts that amateur videographers will soon be competing with the local news:

Many, many bloggers are incorporating video interviews and reporting into their work, and I think that within a year or so we'll see videobloggers beginning to compete with television news operations -- especially local television news operations -- in quite a few places.

I've got so much material from print and television news journalists of where mainstream media is at and where it has been. But the participants of this PDF conference are some of the people who are actively creating where the mainstream media is going to go in the future.

I waited until the very last question to ask Jay Rosen about the future of news and he ripped off this great extended soundbite:

The Internet in general and the rise of the weblog is a very, very radical development because what it means is that the barrier to entry as a media player has come completely down. Just the ability to videotape something and offer it to the world used to cost millions of dollars. And now if you have a digital camera and a weblog, and some skills, and you can post that video -- you can in a sense offer it to the world -- no matter who you are. That's a huge thing. We're just starting to see the implications of it, but it's opening up the media system and it is breaking down some of the power accumulated at the center and we'll still see. I mean we're very early into this revolution, but the world is not going to be the same for the major media in five or ten years -- that much I'm convinced of.

I'm going to start e-mailing some of these PDF A-listers over the next couple of days to tell them to keep an eye out for a plaid-shirt wearing nerd with glasses and a video camera who wants to ask some questions about how technology is changing the media.