Con Coverage

Way back in 1998, one of the exhibitors at Comic-Con (I want to say it was Wizard) set up a live webcam at their booth. It consisted of jumpy video (something like 1 frame every 5 seconds) and no audio, but it was the first time I got any real sense of what the convention was like. I watched as people meandered by, some in costume. Sometimes someone would stop by the booth and present some of their recently obtained swag to the camera. It was very exciting for me, stuck at the time in Ohio, to even participate that tangentially. I expect some local San Diego stations mentioned it in passing to explain why traffic was so bad around the convention center, or maybe as a quick answer to why people might see someone in a Superman or Batman costume walking around. But that kind of video never made it to the internet, so I missed whatever might have aired. Attendance at the show was around 42,000.

Ten years later, the G4 network broadcast live from the show for four hours straight. NBC posted a couple hours of footage on Hulu. Comic Book Resources launched "CBR TV" with both recorded and live pieces from a yacht docked near the convention center. Not to mention how everyone was using social media (Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were all only a few years old then) to post news and photos and videos from the show floor. The show had grown to 126,000.

After several years of fire regulations capping the show to a maximum of 135,000, the show has risen to around 150,000 attendees but I can't seem to find any special coverage. There are certainly outlets that are reporting on the events of the show, there was obviously a bit of excitement about Robert Downey Jr.'s surprise appearance, but I don't get the sense of it being as big a thing as before. Despite the higher attendance. The outlets that seem to be doing anything that would've looked like special coverage ten years ago are retailers focusing on only their properties, and basically just doing video announcements. Marvel Studios, Hasbro, etc. The various networks aren't ignoring the show, but their pieces seem to be limited to two minute human interest pieces. There is some reporting on sites like The Beat and CBR, but they are mostly looking at just the news itself with an almost-forgotten, "Oh, yeah, we heard about this at Comic-Con" line tucked in towards the end somewhere.

So what I'm wondering is: what do these changes actually mean?

I think one of the more obvious things we can take away from this is that specialized news reporting never was never as lucrative as everyone thought it might be. I mean, the reason G4 isn't doing any coverage from the show is because the entire network shut down. Twice, in fact. It was first closed down in 2014, but it was brought back in 2021 only to close again almost exactly one year later. Comcast Spectacor CEO Dave Scott noted at in 2022: "We worked hard to generate that interest in G4, but viewership is low and the network has not achieved sustainable financial results." Look at virtually all the dedicated "geek" news outlets over the past decade or so and you'll find much the same pattern. The actual comics news you followed them for devolved into press releases and generic entertainment news. No one has yet figured out a genuinely long-term business strategy to keep their site in the black. I don't know the finances of any of the sites out there providing Comic-Con coverage but I think I can pretty confidently say sending writers out to cover the show at all is a loss leader at best.

I recall a few years back, I attended a dinner that a publisher hosted during a convention. It included a handful of their authors and several comic news reporters and bloggers were invited. One of the writers, in introducing herself to us, broke the ice by asking each of what we did for a living. The assumption being that no one actually makes money as a comics reporters and that you have to hold some kind of other job to make ends meet. It was actually a fair assumption, too, because everyone did indeed have a "day job" they used to pay the bills.

Basically, pop culture news in general isn't very profitable and, even if you're able to get it to work at all, it doesn't scale up. Whatever venture capital was thrown at various outlets and whatever seed money a larger company set aside for an internal reporting group very quickly got burned through by sending a team to San Diego (and also probably New York) every year and so it's simply not done any more.

But I think there's some other conclusions we can come to from the evolution of Comic-Con reporting. The Star Wars prequels started in 1999. The first X-Men movie came out in 2000 and the first Spider-Man movie in 2002. Those years were the start of a trend in fandom-based pop culture where movies were no longer a 90-120 minute piece of entertainment to be left behind as you exited the theater, but a piece of narrative fiction that you carried with you and became a fan of. As the years roll on, you see more and more of what would've once been dismissed trite junk for geeky outsiders become truly popular with large groups of fans adopting their interest in as a part of their very identity. Lord of the Rings in 2001, Doctor Who in 2005, Twlight in 2005 (for the books) and 2008 (for the movies), Iron Man and the MCU in 2008, Walking Dead in 2010... Some attempts dropped the ball after a few years (Lost, Game of Thrones, etc.) but there were enough different properties out there that spoke to different people to satisfy pretty much everyone. By the time you get to the 2010s, it's virtually everywhere and became something of an accepted part of modern life. Everyone has their special favorite. But as Dash Par pointed out: when everybody is special, no one is.

Yes, Comic-Con only rolls around once a year and it's still a pop culture mecca. But the amount of stuff that would normally debut at Comic-Con is just so high that it HAS to be spread out over the entire year now. You get announcements at New York or Chicago shows. And sometimes at events that are even more hyper-specific, like Star Wars Celebration or JoeFest. Comic-Con isn't as unique or special as it once was in terms of being THE stand-out annual event for pop culture announcements and, therefore, doesn't get specialized attention. So even the local news isn't doing more than their old two minute human interest pieces.

Those are the two biggest stand-out things I can think of regarding what the coverage changes over the years can tell us, but I feel like there's some other big things I'm missing. What do you think? What else does coverage of the show over the years tell us about journalism, about fandoms, about pop culture?

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