SXSW Music Blues and RWW Community Manager Departs
After not seeing ReadWriteWeb's Community Manager during SXSW Interactive, we mutually agree to part ways. Afterwards, I try to enjoy the earsplitting attractions of SXSW Music 2010.
The Ai Weiwei event was a big deal for RWW; we thought it could potentially bring us to the attention of thousands of influential people across the media and technology industries. Maybe we’d even get some serious mainstream attention, since Weiwei was being interviewed by CNN and other big media companies during his stay in New York.
In addition, we’d gotten the rights to exclusively livestream the event and had set up a special page on our site for it. Prior to the event, it included a bunch of our articles on digital activism and a video documentary telling Ai Weiwei’s story.
In support of all this, the rest of the RWW team had arranged to meet up late afternoon on Monday at an Austin coworking space called Conjunctured. Our webmaster, Jared, would handle all the technical matters regarding livestreaming on our website. Mike and Frederic would write up articles on the day. The rest of our writers, including Marshall, would monitor Twitter and other social media while the event was running. Sean would be managing the whole operation and had also set up a Google Talk chat line with Elyssa in New York, to relay any necessary messages to me.
With one exception, the entire team in Austin showed up to Conjunctured. Even Dana Oshiro, who no longer worked for us, was there. The conspicuous absence was Jolie, our community manager. In the group email she’d made an excuse about having prior interview commitments and added, “I didn’t know the coworking space was going to be so far away!” In reply, Sean pointed out that it was just a three-minute taxi ride, which she could charge to the company.
When I discovered the next day that Jolie was the only one who hadn’t been with the team that evening, I was furious about it—especially since she’d also caused trouble at the door of the PBS event on Sunday night. “I’ve only seen you for 10 minutes through all of SXSW,” I emailed on Tuesday. “You’re our full-time community manager, there is really no excuse for missing either of our events.” After a bit of back-and-forth, I arranged to have a sit-down with Jolie when I arrived back in Austin on Wednesday afternoon.
The Interactive part of SXSW would be over before I got back, but I had bought a ticket for the SXSW Music event. Elyssa would be traveling back to Colorado to spend more time with her parents and son. My plan was to unwind in Austin over the following five nights and enjoy a bunch of live music. I didn’t know of anyone else going to SXSW Music, but I figured there would be a few Interactive refugees there. In any case, I wanted time to myself to think through personal and business goals.
While I was on the way back to Austin on Wednesday, Jolie published a post to her personal blog entitled “Why SXSW Sucks.” The gist of it was that there were too many people, which prevented her from having “a wonderful time meeting up with my friends.” The post got a lot of attention on the social web that day. She’d made some good points about the lack of good technology content at the event and about the increased danger to women because of what she termed “swarms of douchebags.” But still, I couldn’t get past the fact that she was more focused on wanting to meet up with her friends than on the job that was paying her to work the event.
I met up with Jolie late on Thursday morning, on Sixth Street outside one of the popular diners. As ever, she stood out in the crowd—her bright orange hair was tied back into pigtails, and she was carrying a pair of roller skates. But I could see in her eyes that she was apprehensive about the meeting and that something was weighing on her. Since it was around lunchtime, I suggested we go into the restaurant to eat and talk properly.
After we’d ordered, I repeated my concerns about the team not seeing her during Interactive. We’d had two important team events over the past several days, I said, and our community manager hadn’t contributed to either of them. She was apologetic and began talking about her bad experiences. Pretty soon tears welled up in her eyes and her voice faltered. This caught me off guard. I assured her that I was no longer angry; I was just disappointed she hadn’t done her job. She’d talked in prior months about her periods of depression, so I tried to be sensitive to this as we continued talking.
Over the course of the lunch, it became clear that neither of us wanted her to continue as RWW’s community manager. I honestly hadn’t known how this meeting would turn out—whether I’d have to let her go or whether Jolie would convince me to give her another chance with RWW. I was open to the latter, but evidently, she wanted out. She told me of her plans to branch out from tech blogging, maybe do some product-management work for startups. I said I understood, and so we mutually agreed that she would leave RWW. I told her we’d be flexible about the timing and asked her to let me know later by email what (if any) work she wanted to do for us before she moved on.
The rest of the lunch was more relaxed, and at the end of it we parted on good terms. Back out on Sixth Street, we hugged and I sincerely wished her all the best. “I’m sure we’ll see you around,” I said.
Soon after, I messaged the management team to tell them Jolie was leaving and began preparing a note for the rest of the team in Basecamp. Of course, there was one more twist in the tale—after our lunch, Jolie promptly posted to her blog that she had “quit” RWW. I immediately emailed and asked her to please not message it that way. “It was a mutual decision that you should go, and that is best way to message this publicly,” I said. To her credit, she quickly removed that language.
Less than two weeks later, we found out via Jolie’s blog that she had joined Mashable. Since it was posted on April 1st, I emailed her and rather ungraciously asked if this was an April Fool’s joke. But soon I recognized that this made sense for Jolie—she was still young and was a talented blogger, when she put her mind to it. Mashable was lucky to have her.
This left RWW without a community manager and short one daily blogger. With our next event slated for May, we needed to move quickly to fill the vacant position.
SXSW Music
During SXSW Music I stayed at the Hyatt Regency, which was a little further uptown and over a bridge. Even though it was still walking distance from all the action downtown, it was far enough away to make me feel isolated. I had thought I’d see at least a few people from Interactive at the music event or around the hotel lobby, but after I’d parted ways with Jolie on Thursday at midday, I didn’t see a single geek in the remaining four nights in Austin.
Starting on Thursday afternoon, I wandered Sixth Street and all the satellite streets to check out the music. I was a fan of the NPR podcast All Songs Considered and had noted down some SXSW acts I’d heard on their show and liked. One was a band called Cymbals Eat Guitars, who were playing a 2:00 p.m. set at the open-air Mexican American Cultural Center stage. But I was forced to leave after just a few songs because of the earsplitting volume at the venue. I soon discovered this was a common theme at SXSW Music: extreme amplification, to the point where all I was hearing was screech and noise. It wasn’t the relaxing vibe I was hoping for. Or perhaps, at thirty-eight, I was simply feeling my age.
Since I had no one to talk to and was too shy to strike up a conversation with anyone standing next to me at a concert or bar, I spent a lot of time thinking about RWW and where I was at in my personal life. On the business front, I was feeling overwhelmed with all the typical things a startup CEO has to deal with—finances, managing people (and finding new people when required, which seemed to be a never-ending cycle), legal (complicated by being an NZ company), resource allocation, and the various wanted and unwanted requests on my time that came with running a media company.
It was a productive time for RWW, but that meant it was super busy. We’d just released our second major premium report, although it was already clear that it wouldn’t be as profitable as we’d hoped. Our second Silicon Valley event was coming up in early May, and we continued to churn out new channels. We’d launched ReadWriteCloud at the end of January and had another couple in the works—one for developers, called ReadWriteHack, and a smartphone apps one called ReadWriteMobile. The international channels were ramping up as well.
Through all this, my personal life was far from settled. Even a year after I’d separated from my wife, I was still trying to hash out a financial settlement. At issue was the value of my business, which our two sets of lawyers and accountants were busy racking up large bills arguing about. I was also acutely aware that my daughter was growing up fast (she would be nine later this year) and that I needed to spend more time with her.
On Saturday, the weather suddenly turned cold and windy. I went to one party in the afternoon dressed in a light jacket but had to return to my hotel afterward to put on my winter jacket. That evening there was going to be a tribute concert at Antone’s nightclub for Alex Chilton, from the seventies band Big Star. The band had been scheduled to play at SXSW that week, but Chilton had died suddenly on Wednesday, aged fifty-nine. I’d heard that at least one member of REM—a longtime favorite band—would be at the tribute night.
I knew I’d have to turn up early to even get into Antone’s, so I made sure I was there before the first warm-up act had started. The famous Austin blues club had been one of the first music venues on Sixth Street (although its present location was on West Fifth Street). I was expecting a grand-looking establishment, and the signage and billboard above the front door did nothing to dissuade me from this—underneath the Antone’s logo, the billboard improbably read Free Day Show / Sweden Goes SXSW. However, when I got inside, I was surprised by how small the venue was.
While I was sipping a beer at the bar, I overheard a conversation between the barman and another punter about the extreme volume at SXSW shows. The barman nodded in agreement but said that going deaf was an occupational hazard he’d had to accept as part of his job. That seemed crazy to me, but what did I know about being young and free in a music city like Austin?
Halfway through my beer, the first act got onstage. To my dismay, it soon became evident that the amplifiers had been turned up way too loud again. The act was a bad version of the young David Bowie, strumming an acoustic guitar at deafening volume in a song that somewhat resembled “Space Oddity”—or, at least, I heard snippets of that kind of song between the squarks of tinny feedback. I quickly decided I couldn’t take it anymore, so I gulped down the remainder of my beer and left. The growing line of people outside Antone’s gave me strange looks as a I scurried out the front door and back “down the street,” as the Big Star song went.
I soon discovered that every bar on Sixth Street was hosting an aggressive guitar-rock band, so I looked at my SXSW Music map to see what other options there were. The Central Presbyterian Church venue on East Eighth Street seemed like a good bet for a more relaxing vibe, so I walked in that direction. It turned out to be an actual church, and there I saw an act called the Watson Twins. A pair of beautiful brunette women from Louisville, Kentucky, they sang sweet harmonies above the melodic organ and relaxed guitar of their male backing band. Included in the set was a cover version of Sade’s “Sweetest Taboo,” a song I remembered fondly from the eighties.
After the show, I bought the band’s latest CD, Talking to You, Talking to Me—an ironic title, given how alone I felt at SXSW Music—and complimented one of the ladies about the Sade cover. I think these were the only words I’d spoken to anyone in over forty-eight hours, other than ordering a chili dog at a Sixth Street cart or a beer at a venue. Ms. Watson politely thanked me for the compliment and duly signed the CD.
I continued on my way, and for the next hour or so I checked out the bars in and around Sixth Street, but no matter where I went the music was uncomfortably loud. I eventually circled back to East Eighth Street, but by then even the church had turned the amps up!
Now armed with earplugs, I decided to walk down to Antone’s again—it was now about 11:30 p.m. Maybe I’d be in time to catch the Big Star tribute. But, as expected, the line was extremely long. So I called it a night and began the lonely trek back to my hotel uptown, where at least it would be quiet and warm.
This post is part of my serialized book, Bubble Blog: From Outsider to Insider in Silicon Valley's Web 2.0 Revolution. View table of contents.
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