With SXSW 2020 just around the corner, there’s plenty of action in store for the 400 thousand people headed to Austin, Texas. Among those headed to the live music capital are a number of media outlets. Mainstays among those include The New York Times, CNN, Uproxx, Vox (Polygon), Inc., Fast Company, and the perennial “Mashable House.” In 2020 though, there is a newcomer in the mix, Grit Daily, which assembled a team from a number of other outlets and tilts heavily towards events.
At over 500K unique viewers per month and an audience of 62% women, purportedly high-income and in big cities in the U.S., Grit Daily’s contributions to Miami Art Week, CES, Sundance Film Festival, and SXSW are — according to those who have seen them — “legendary” — lending credibility to its reputation as the “champion of live journalism.”
Just two-weeks away from Austin’s biggest and liveliest festival, Grit Daily House brings Austin’s 150,000 technophiles a badass lineup of renowned leaders in the tech/media space, including Grit Daily’s team of former VentureBeat Analyst-at-Large Stewart Rogers, former New York Observer’s Drew Grant, and former Entrepreneur.com Contributions Editor, Peter Page — along with a number of guest moderators and speakers that interestingly markets other news outlets — including Rob Pegoraro (USA Today), Mary Ann Azevedo (Crunchbase News), Anna Escher (TechCrunch), and Marty Swant (Forbes). Perhaps the approach to integrate other outlets is selfless — or just a smart strategy.
Grit Daily House itself has a more direct collaboration with Portland-based Digital Trends, the largent independent technology publisher. Digital Trends will be taking over the Grit Daily House on March 14-15. Their portion of the programming will spotlight women in tech and “tech for change,” their editorial category that explores innovation for the betterment of humanity. The Grit Daily x Digital Trends collaboration will also feature surprise musical guests.
Located in downtown Austin and running from March 13-20, Grit Daily House promises to be packed with speaker panels providing food, drinks, live-music, and of course, brand demos/activations with top media and guest moderator-journalists. And given its footprint, the audience will skew “VVIP.” We like the sound of that. And at American Reporter, we’re intrigued by the collaboration with Digital Trends, which itself has pushed into the “live” space — to dive into all things good, tech, culture, film, and music.
Between Drew Grant, former Arts & Entertainment Editor at The New York Observer heading up Grit Daily’s editorial and Peter Page, Entrepreneur Magazine’s former contributions editor, creating, shaping, and expanding Grit’s contributor network, there’s nothing that can stop the endless realm of innovation and creativity waiting to join the ever-growing ranks of what Grit Daily is building out with its live-journalism division.
It’s one thing to champion a kick-ass story, but it’s another thing entirely to champion the very individuals that comprise a powerhouse media structure.
Without Grit Daily’s venerable crew, which includes individuals from ABC, CBS, CNN, Fast Company, Forbes, FOX News Channel, PopSugar, SF Chronicle, Verge, Vice, VentureBeat, and Vox, live-events at CES, Web Summit, Collision, Amazon Alexa’s Voice Summit, Ascent, The Next Web, and SXSW wouldn’t be possible.
With Ideas Editor Yelena Mandenberg, who has been with Grit Daily since its inception, Editors-At-Large Olivia Smith (PopSugar), Jennifer Matthews (CNN), Julia Sachs, Sarah Kocur (EDM.com), Stewart Rogers (VentureBeat), and Tina Mulqueen (Digital Trends) continuing to fuel an endless tank of diversity, lending to the 5.2 million users each year while maintaining a 60% women audience.
“The fight for equality must be constant,” Grit Daily founder and Executive Editor, Jordan French told Inno & Tech Today in an interview last year. “You have to be all in, all the time. You can’t fight for equality on Monday but forget about the struggle come Friday. It’s going to take a lot of grit to put an end to inequality.”
And injecting ethics into today’s world of media journalism, both French and co-founder, Andrew Rossow, who also happen to be licensed attorneys, addressed the lack of sustainability that these traditional models that outlets continue to operate by:
“We need to see the news and the economics happening directly in front of us,” Rossow emphasized. “In an era of fake news and questions concerning content accuracy, live-journalism is absolutely essential. Otherwise, we will see the end of media and journalism. It’s just not a sustainable model any longer in 2020.”
