Once Gateway Media decided it wanted to cover one of the biggest festivals of the year, the company naturally tapped one of its only staffers who had experience in both editorial oversight and on-the-spot reporting: me. 

Relying upon my journalism and project management skills, I led Gateway's first foray into major pre-packaged and live-event coverage at South by Southwest (SXSW). Focusing on the interactive portion of the event but covering all aspects of the festival, I worked with multiple teams to bring vertical-specific stories to five of the company's biggest sites: Brainjet (tech/science, entertainment, life hacks, trivia, general info), Suggest (celebrities), Oola (food), AroundMe (travel) and Minq (women's lifestyle). 

Before the conference, I turned my writing team into the SXSW funnel, guiding them to write about celebrity inventions, festival navigation tips, what NOT to wear and more, all to ramp up vertical-specific reader interest before the festival. During SXSW, I reported daily for each of our sites (some items are included below) and worked with a videographer to capture footage that would sell both in blogs and as direct social media videos. I also employed plenty of SEO copywriting tricks to drive more eyes to the stories. Our first SXSW outing resulted in increased daily traffic for all sites and Facebook pages, and upon my return I shared tips for reporting from on-location with other writers and editors.

Note: All screenshots below have been taken at different points since my departure -- some via the sites themselves and some via the Wayback Machine. The CMS has changed multiple times, so not all items appear the way they did when I left and not all links are available. The CMS apparently also has eaten many apostrophes in headlines and blog copy; I swear that I know how to use punctuation.