Pitching The Echo Chamber at SxSW

I must have pitched The Echo Chamber Project over 50 times over the last week at the SxSW Interactive Conference. I learned something new each time that I talked to someone about it because either new questions were asked or I adapted how I was speaking based upon the verbal and non-verbal feedback that I was receiving from them.

It is A LOT easier to pitch my project to people face-to-face, and by the end of the week I was able to convey the scope and relevance of my project relatively quickly and to many different people.

Here's the latest version of my pitch, and I'm sure that it'll continue to evolve over time:

I'm doing a open source documentary on the failures of the mainstream media, and how I'm producing the film will hopefully help fix these problems.

I'm using five months of television news footage to show how they became an Echo Chamber to the Countdown towards war in Iraq.

I'll be using an online social network to collaboratively edit the project by open sourcing the text of the 45 interviews that we conducted with journalists, think tank scholars, media critics, journalism professors and other experts. I'm also using more sophisticated analytical techniques that are able to pool the collective intelligence of our society by combining the principles of the scientific method and postmodern subjectivity.

Whew... I think it still needs some work, but this is roughly what people heard if they talked to me in the last couple of days. It's designed to make the subject ask more questions rather than explain everything -- and it seems as though that this pitch did a good job of hooking people in and starting conversations that lasted up to an hour.

[Tag: sxsw]