Opinion: The cancellation of MacWorld Expo Boston is a clarion call for the communications industry.Last week, IDG World Expo announced that MacWorld Expo Boston has been cancelled. That low rumble you hear now is the early mutterings of doomsayers who are going to use this as one more example of the decline of the communications industry.
I disagree. I think the cancellation of MacWorld Boston, and the news that IDG will subsequently focus on the single expo in San Francisco, will be a positive change. In fact, I'd like to see the same kind of consolidation for other industry events.
Virtually every week, I get an e-mail announcing the New Premier Event for the Whatever Industry Segment.
As more regional and specialty shows appear on the calendar, vendors are stretched to the limit until they are forced to choose only a few events from the myriad options.
This means attendees also have to be more selective, which spreads the same number of people (or fewer, as most industry reports suggest) across a larger space. So with each new event, the number of attending vendors and customers gets smaller.
Five years ago, the Gutenberg Festival was one of the largest regional print industry events.
But the show has since deteriorated so much that it was moved from a beautiful location in Long Beach, Calif., to half of a single hall in the Los Angeles convention center, where your personal safety is questionable if you decide to wander outside by yourself.
The NAPL (National Association for Printing Leadership), one of the owners of the Graphic Arts Show Company that puts on the event, didn't even bother to have a booth at the relocated show.
As the regional shows like Gutenberg Festival continue to deteriorate, attendees are going to be more and more disappointed and, like me, will simply stop attending.
The bigger shows are already suffering, and the smaller shows will eventually specialize themselves right out of business.
Even though trade shows are the best way to keep up on what's new and what's next, small companies—which compose a large part of the communications industry—may decide that the shows have become a luxury they can't afford.
Soft color proofing systems highlight digital gains at Print 05. Click here to read more.
Focusing on a single national show instead of multiple regional events is the best thing that MacWorld could do to not only revive the event's popularity, but also provide a single point of information for those who need it.
Vendors will be able to focus their energy and resources on a single event, which will in turn benefit those who attend the show. Hopefully, this will serve as a model for similar changes to other industry events.
This year we saw the co-location of Seybold Seminars and the Print 05 show, which meant attendees could participate in both events in a single trip. ("Co-location" is the official term since the two events were put on by two different companies and required two different fees to attend; hopefully, we will eventually see a single event with one fee structure.)
GraphExpo/Print had already combined most of the back-end processes (printing, converting, and even mailing and fulfillment) into a single event.
By co-locating the Seybold Seminars, now the front-end people are being invited to the party as well. Although there is a prepress section at the GraphExpo/Print shows, front-end processes have never really been the primary focus.
Holding a single, combined industry event might also have some less-obvious benefits.
I've worked on both the creation and output sides of the industry, and there is little doubt that communication between the two is lacking.
Many people in the printing industry complain about the almost-tangible gap between those who create content and those who output it, which is a major cause of the problems that slow down or stop the prepress workflow.
Combining the front-end and back-end shows brings the two groups together, or at least puts them in the same room.
Who knows? If a printer and a designer accidentally sit at the same table for lunch, some new knowledge might seep into the collective conscience of the different factions and we might inadvertently learn something from one another.
One or two communication barriers might even begin to crumble, and the industry as a whole will profit.
Erika Kendra is a free-lance graphic designer and writer in Los Angeles.
