Windfall of 2008 Tech Media Forecasts

Last week, the Silicon Valley chapter of the PRSA held its annual “media predictions” event, this year featuring six of the top tech media professionals (Kara Swisher, Co-Executive Editor, D:All Things Digital Blog and Conference, Rob Hof, Silicon Valley Bureau Chief, BusinessWeek, Jim Goldman, Silicon Valley Bureau Chief, CNBC, Victoria Murphy Barret, Associate Editor, Forbes, Robert Scoble, Blogger and Technology Columnist for Fast Company, and Don Clark, Deputy SF Bureau Chief, Wall Street Journal) on a panel moderated by legendary venture capitalist Ann Winblad. The journalists held forth on a wide range of tech media and PR topics. If you weren’t one of the 350 tech PR people in the room but you are interested in where tech media coverage is going in 2008, I recommend you take the time to check out proceedings from this event.

Here’s a link to a compilation of blog posts about the event on the PRSA Silicon Valley blog.

Here’s a link to the video of the panel posted by Podtech.net

Here’s a link to the video of the Q&A on Podtech.net

Among the insights from the panel:

• Kara Swisher: everyone is going to have an online presence — that will just be part of life; I haven’t read a newspaper [in print form] in years; the big story in 2008 will be the recession


• Don Clark: virtualization is coming to the desktop


• Kara’s quote of the night: “How is Yahoo going to get up off its sorry ass?” She added that she didn’t mean the company didn’t have millions of users and lots of great services, but that it didn’t seem to have a lot of excitement and momentum surrounding it


• Jim Goldman: yes there will be a U.S. recession, but not necessarily a global one, and so the effect on Silicon Valley may be limited, since 75% of sales are now coming from outside the U.S.


• Don: yes, but will the U.S. malaise spread to other economies?


• Victoria Barret: regarding Silicon Valley’s role in developing cleantech: we’ll save the world if we can do it profitably

2008-specific predictions:

• Robert Scoble: publishing video directly from cell phone to web


• Don Clark: some Second Life companies will go away


• Jim Goldman: Yahoo gets acquired or takes a significant investment from Abu Dhabi


• Victoria Barret: lots of acquisitions and consolidation


• Rob Hof: if the credit crunch continues, it will spread to tech and more tech companies will go into the dead pool


• Kara Swisher: Increased political grandstanding in this election year about online privacy issues, online pedophilia

What do your viewers/readers care about?

• Jim Goldman: people who watch our network want to know what’s happening with your companies as early as possible


• Victoria: visually arresting, counter-intuitive stories. We are interested in stories with at least 2 of the following: conflict, drama and struggle