The sanctification of Mayor David Miller helped prevent the fourth annual Mesh Conference from seeming like ill-timed celebration of dot-com greed in the thick of a downturn, as Toronto’s most famous person with a Twitter account did his part to explain the role of the internet in public service, alongside other speakers touting social activism and charitable initiatives. Meanwhile, with profit-seeking companies suddenly rattled by the sound of that twain coming down the twacks, a two-day event — preceded by one day of tech workshops — that itself might have been forced to deal with the ravages of recessionomics ended up selling out all of its $469 badges.
This year will go down in the history of Canada’s Web Conference as the one where the organizers pondered the value of incorporating Twitter into the audience-participation segment of each panel discussion. Thanks to the magic of social media, no longer would the socially-awkward be excluded from speaking in public, having their questions read out loud by a moderator instead — an intriguing idea, until it sinks in just how passive the process can become.
Technology can also hinder the idea of journalists showing up at such an event to be, well, journalists. Most of those interested parties with day jobs in professional media circles — chief among them Mesh co-founder Mathew Ingram, also communities editor for The Globe and Mail — were benefiting from the conference in ways that may have been good for their own professional development, inhibiting genuine criticism from the otherwise objective fray. The emerging decorum that calls for adding hashtags to every Tweet related to the conference might encourage a certain civility — but it also discourages an accessible public platform to dissect the real-world worth of all the ideas.
A juicy bit was revealed during a late Tuesday afternoon panel, featuring three celebrated out-of-towners, on “The Future of News.” Turns out, were all those applying for some kind of media accreditation for Mesh were approved, they’d hardly have anyone left paying for the event. Determining who among the hopefuls actually qualified as a reporter was apparently a source of friction between the organizers. Constantly propagating the view that everyone can be a journalist backfires when those most likely to adopt these delivery systems are your own customers.
Furthermore, the futurist tone of the conference seems to discourage any participation from the typical Toronto mediamaker: one who developed their chops in the past century, and perfectly comfortable with making the web their primary platform, if only there was a way they could get paid.
The exclusion of that factor means Mesh is largely confined to the geek-friendly MaRS Centre. A couple of evening socials don’t compensate for the fact that festivals in this town celebrating more established forms of creativity remain a universe apart. And nothing real is ever going to be achieved until a bridge is built. Just consider how South by Southwest seamlessly extended its brand from music festival to interactive conference, along with a film component, and makes it all make sense.
For the time being, however, anyone with roots in the old-school business of show who crosses the tech threshold can get away with saying just about anything. David Usher, a Mesh mascot making his second annual appearance to discuss his music industry survival strategies, was given a 50-minute platform to spout the kind of passive-aggressive platitudes that would have him laughed out of the room at last month’s Canadian Music Week. But, for an audience paying money to hear how they are hip enough to know better, Usher can say no wrong.
And it’s not like the EMI Music Canada staffers who overextended themselves trying to get attention for the alt-rock band Usher fronted through the 1990s, Moist, are going to complain — most of them are out of their jobs, while he’s still got his career, exerting control over his output that was unfathomable when the Moist song “Push” received saturation radio and video airplay. But attention for Moist also had plenty to do with federal regulations — for domestic investment in talent by broadcasters and record companies — while attempts to break the band stateside never clicked.
Usher’s tranquil personality is the reason he’s not taken for an ingrate. Rather, the softball questions lobbed by Mesh co-founder Mark Evans were based on the idea that opportunities to make money from music can only get better. A dedicated fan base in Southeast Asia — owing as much to Usher’s own Thai genes as EMI’s worldwide network of affiliates — has further empowered him to reach out through social media from his Montreal home, along with participation in a forthcoming music startup, a desktop application called DEQQ. Dismissing all the factors that got him to this stage, however, sounds like little more than catharsis for his past pop-star frustration.
But, in this setting, not only could Usher be unchallenged by suggesting that newspapers are dead as a promotional medium for anyone who hasn’t been around as long as him — citing the Vancouver Sun, whose tech reporter filed a fluffy online item that day — but that he’s perplexed by younger acts still looking to get their demo into the hands of a major label. Nickelback — the last surviving Canadian corporate rock opportunists — he has no issues with; Usher assured the audience that the songs written by Chad Kroeger are commercial on purpose, and not necessarily the kind of compositions closest to his heart.
Blogging for dollars was also on the Tuesday afternoon agenda, packing a room for “Hyper-local media: Does it work,” featuring the keepers of BlogTO, Torontoist and Spacing, none of whom have lacked for exposure. But being sites that Mesh attendees were most likely to know created an overflow appetite to hear some secrets. Yet the moderator, Nora Young of CBC Radio One’s Spark, couldn’t have seemed less interested in the subject. Because the subject is not terribly interesting.
Nonetheless, the three representatives of the Toronto sites did their best to express something unique about their respective evolutions: Matthew Blackett, whose Spacing Wire became the de facto assignment desk for inspiration-deprived local broadsheets during their final run at trying to engage younger readers in 2005-06, has built relationships with enough satisfied social-innovation-related advertisers to confidently extend Spacing’s daily content across the country — with Montreal soon joined by Vancouver, along with adopting a couple of bloggers in Windsor.
The somewhat more misunderstood BlogTO apparently owes its origins to publisher Tim Shore’s befuddlement over the success of toronto.com — having gradually streamlined his model in that servicey direction, for the sake of search-engine perpetuity, while continuing to feed off the daily blogger grind with sporadic results. But, after four years, he has never put a virtual gun to his own virtual temple and threatened to close down.
Such was the recent saga of Torontoist — this week, finally revealing a new infrastructure that will make its ownership local, and ensure contributors get paid a few bucks on the way to building a viable Canadian blog business. This formal announcement turned out to be a bit of a letdown — it’s not much of a secret that further partnerships and expansion will be necessary to make this idea work — but the sense of self-importance has only been inflated by the mediocrity of local mainstream media’s online efforts. When recalling his own experience of staying on top of an exclusive breaking story — the fake-bomber art student who terrorized the Royal Ontario Museum to great consternation in November 2007 — Torontoist editor David Topping (pictured above) relayed his own news-gathering experience with all the wonderment of a mommy blogger who acts like she’s the first woman in the world to ever spawn a child.
The aforementioned “Future of News” panel at the end of Tuesday afternoon said very much the same things about the inability of the newspaper to reconfigure itself — with Gabe Rivera of Web 2.0 aggregator Techmeme, David Cohn of community-funded reporting site Spot.us, and Rachel Nixon of “Crowd Powered Media” contraption NowPublic — only these bigger-picture speakers were more self-assured about their role. Maybe that says plenty about who can prevail through the smoke and mirrors of citizen journalism. Professional reporters accustomed to scouting scoops are too neurotic by nature to win over investors; this role is better left to cooler heads Vancouver-based NowPublic’s Global News Director Nixon — whose Emma Peel-like countenance, and accent, fits every moneyman’s fantasy of what a lady journalist should be. Her challenge is to make something remotely valuable out of the potentially mediocre volunteer submissions.
Wednesday’s mid-morning keynote at Mesh took a different turn: Bonin Bough, director of digital and social media at PepsiCo, filled with infectious enthusiasm for the fizzy drinks whose future marketing is under his thumb. Bough is just six months into a gig where the online backlash surrounding new packaging for Tropicana juices is the hottest topic — and none of this he seems to mind, knowing PepsiCo’s fortunes won’t fall based on a miscalculation like that, especially when they can harness the reaction for target-market research. Really, it’s the same game as any Web 2.0 racket, only with the added benefit of having everyone relate to what is being bought and sold.
David Miller was the star attraction for Wednesday morning, of course, basking in the enthusiasm for his compulsive Tweeting over the winter months, set to be reflected in more web-based advances by the City of Toronto. Telling his own 50-year-old story of learning about computers in the era of punch cards, slide rules and pocket calculators instantly ingratiated him to a room of influental voters. The forthcoming initiative, toronto.ca/open, will make all City Hall data accessible to the public — just one promised tactic for getting municipal government’s online houses in order.
Not required after the mayor’s prepared speech was the pseudo-antagonism of Jesse Brown — just because someone hosts a CBC podcast doesn’t mean they’re qualified to ask questions at a conference, clearly — but Miller quickly took the reins anyhow. The frustrations expressed didn’t concern political transparency, however — it was about whether Toronto was going to follow through on all its claim of being the kind of town that someone working in the tech field wouldn’t want to leave. Blunders like the blandly institutional TorontoTechWeek, or selling public wi-fi to Toronto Hydro — later flipped to Cogeco Cable, who now charge $29 for a monthly subscription — haven’t helped City Hall’s reputation with Torontonians aspiring to do something innovative in this arena.
Miller was contrite about past short-sightedness — the wi-fi deal paid for much-needed repairs to public housing, see — and related anecdotes about how the internet is now integral to the lives of lower-income computer-deprived folk who might as well live several planets away from the MaRS Centre; at least the ones he didn’t recently see stampeding to the terminals at the Toronto Reference Library when it opens at 9:30am. These aspirations will surely be an integral part of the platform for his 2010 re-election campaign.
A mayor with a Twitter account can also turn the tables on the critics, of course. Next time Miller is asking to keep his job, rest assured that every social media gimmick conjured up over the next 18 months will be part of the effort. Which is too bad for the select few who looked at local election campaigns as their own little cultish contribution to the blogosphere — back when they were able to slink around these church-basement debates without being captured by a candidate’s own TwitPics.
Regardless, per the rapid rate of change pondered at an event like Mesh, playing politics through these tools is an old story. And, when the most creatively-engaged keynoter turns out to be a flack from Pepsi, it just reaffirms skepticism that the new media won’t end up feeling much different than the old. Profit may no longer be the driving force behind a web conference, and Twitter may transform how we find the news, but this particular party is going to be over without more art.
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