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Omar Gallaga is the author of the popular technology blog Digital Savant on austin360. I caught up with him on blogging, improv, and sneaking up on Sarah Lacy. You can follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/omarg. |
MICHELLE:
Your Digital Savant blog allows you to diss the addition of a Motley Crue song to the video game “Rock Band”. Did you sell your soul to the devil or something? How did you score a gig that PAYS you to blog about video games?
OMAR:
I KNOW! That’s always the biggest revelation when I speak to students about journalism. It really started when I began working on the Statesman business desk way back in 1997. I’d always been big into video games and whenever there was an opportunity to write about a local game company (like Origin Systems), I always took it. After a while, I began writing more about personal tech and keeping up with the games industry became a larger part of my job.
Now, it’s probably only about 15 percent of my job, but I still try to keep up with what’s going on and play as much as I can. People forget, though, that sometimes you also have to play the really awful, worthless video games.
Surprisingly, not a lot of other people in the newsroom had a lot of interest in writing about the subject. I think a lot of people still think video games aren’t worth writing about unless you’re talking about the industry of interactive entertainment. I tend to think that there’s a lot culturally going on and that people my age (33) or younger have a lot of memories and cultural references built around games.
At the very least, it’s kind of nice not to have had all those hours I spent growing up playing video games be a complete waste. Now I also run a Web site about video gaming culture and history called Videogamey and I’m finding that I have more video game memories floating around in my head that I ever thought.
MICHELLE:
Your Digital Savant archives go all the way back to April of 2005. How did blogging and your blog in particular come about at Austin360.com?
OMAR:
It’s actually been even longer than that. Before Digital Savant, we all contributed to an “XL Blog” that was much more general. I would write about DVDs or movies or whatever else was happening. At the time, it was very experimental and only pertained to entertainment. Over time, we realized we should probably break them out into separate blogs and make them more thematic.
People in the newsroom knew that I had a pretty popular personal blog at the time that I’d been writing since 2000, so it was a natural fit for me. And technology is something I’ve always enjoyed writing about, even when I was editing our Spanish-language newspaper, ˇahora sí!. I kept “Digital Savant” going even as I was doing a whole other full-time job.
MICHELLE:
You were recently named “Employee of the Month” at the Austin American Statesman for your comprehensive coverage of your SxSW Interactive coverage. Do expand on your coverage of the conference, the disastrous Zuckerburg keynote and your run-in with Sarah Lacy.
OMAR:
It was very much a mix of good planning, long hours and some luck. My editor Sarah Lindner and I had been planning our coverage of South by Southwest Interactive for months. We’d shot videos of Hugh Forrest way in advance and had made plans to record a video of the Zuckerberg keynote. For a while, we weren’t even sure we were going to be allowed to do that and I was wrangling with SXSWi PR people over whether we would have any problems doing that or not. As it turned out, there was a whole crowd of people videotaping. But I got there an hour and a half early just to make sure I’d have a seat in the front row.
We taped the whole keynote in HD and had someone on staff waiting back at the newsroom to edit the video and post it as soon as possible. I handed the camera over when the keynote was done and we had a four-minute version of the keynote up within a few hours. As it was happening, I kept a log of interesting things that were said and things that happened and e-mailed that to the video editor so she knew exactly which clips to pull.
A few hours later, I was hunting for food and someone helped get me into an invitation-only event. Sarah Lacy happened to be there and I had my little Canon point-and-shoot. I overheard her talking to someone about the keynote and kind of laughing the whole thing off. I introduced myself and asked her if she wouldn’t mind saying what she was just saying on camera. She was very friendly and agreed.
As soon as I had the footage, I called my editor to tell her. By this time, Twitter and online blogs were already buzzing about the keynote and I knew we needed to get it up online. Our video editor had already left for the day, so I edited the footage myself on my Macbook and uploaded it to YouTube. Then it spread all over the Web after I posted about it on Twitter. It was just pure luck that I happened to run into her and that she agreed to be on video. By the next day, it seemed like the video was everywhere.
As for the rest of the conference, several of us kept in touch via text message or Twitter and we covered the conference in blogs and videos. We learned a lot. It was the first year I’d really thrown myself into SXSW in a while since coming back to covering technology and it involved commuting from New Braunfels every day and working 12-14 hour days. It was exhausting, but also really exciting. We want to do a lot more video next year and to find better ways to get updates out more quickly and efficiently.
MICHELLE:
Does the Statesman provide you will all the cool products you write about, and if so, do you get to keep them?
OMAR:
Companies send us videogames and tech products for review, but generally they ask if we want to review something first and I try to keep it very limited so we don’t get flooded with stuff we’ll never get to and have to mail back. Products that companies don’t want back (like video games or promotional junk) gets put in a company sale charity to benefit local schools.
I keep some video games for reference in case I think I may need to go back and play it again for an expansion pack or for future downloads. (Say, “Rock Band” or stuff on Xbox Live.) It’s not any different than what a music critic deals with: tons of CDs that end up in bins that you’ll never have time to review. Games usually end up in the charity sale or in a drawer, sadly.
MICHELLE:
How long do you think you’ll be on Twitter before someone throws your phone out a window?
OMAR:
My wife wants to throw my iPhone across the room sometimes. I haven’t gotten bored with Twitter yet, mostly because it went from being entertaining to useful for my job. I love it when big news spreads through Twitter or somebody posts something short, but profound.
MICHELLE:
Where are the best places to find you online?
OMAR:
My blog is at Digital Savant and I also write for Television Without Pity, Videogamey and a comic I do with my brother called “Space Monkeys!” at actiongravy.com.
