Behind The Story

March 16, 2010 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

Thank goodness the editors and writers at Tradeshow Week are not forced to write about the health care insurance debate that is overwhelming Washington, D.C., this week – but the problems I see the journalists who do cover it having are similar to some we have with an ongoing story of our own.

Like many people in the newsgathering business, I’ve been reading the various publications and blogs that keep track of these things as they discuss the challenges the media has had in reporting on the national health care debate and some of the inadequacies of its coverage. The majority opinion, among journalists themselves, seems to be that much of their coverage on health care has been shallow, tilted more...Read More

March 5, 2010 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

Elsewhere on our Web site you can see the news that United Business Media will reprise Comdex in the form of a virtual event in November. The live version breathed its ignominious last breath six years ago, and still tradeshow industry veterans are sharing their tales (some of them, tall tales) about its rise and fall.

Occasionally, when I speak with somebody who knows almost nothing about the tradeshow industry, the one show they tend to be able to call to mind is Comdex. It’s the show, dead or alive, everybody’s heard of. (Of course, a new generation of non-TSW readers is beginning to say, “Oh, you mean like ...Read More

February 3, 2010 | Link This | Email this | Comments (3)

A while back, I mentioned to a show organizer I know in Hong Kong that I’d been to Macau a couple months earlier and visited the convention and tradeshow facilities at the Venetian Macau.

His response was, “Could you see it for all the cobwebs?”

Although it’s not possible to get anybody at the Las Vegas Sands to comment on much of anything, from the ground level it looks like – though there have been some successful shows held there – the dream that, along with so many other things, M...Read More

January 29, 2010 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

People in Washington, D.C., have been telling me an anchor hotel next to the Walter E. Washington Convention Center was on its way practically since I first came to Tradeshow Week more than seven years ago.

The all-too-clichéd “ducks in a row” seemed to be lined up, however, with the land secured, investors in place, a brand (Marriott) decided on and a date for groundbreaking established. Then, a couple of weeks ago, the owners of another Marriott down the street, the Wardman Park ...Read More

January 26, 2010 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

The recent announcements that Greg Farrar had resigned as president and CEO of Nielsen Business Media and that Gordon T. Hughes II would be leaving American Business Media later this summer can be added to a long list of similar announcements concerning tradeshow-related institutions during the past year or so.

In fact, there have been so many of these announcements, under so many different kinds of circumstances, that one of the first – Mike Cooke, former CEO of dmg world media – now practically seems like ancient history.

It inspired me to get at least semi-scientific about...Read More