It's become something of a tradition in the past few years -- members of the national tech media descend on Austin for SXSW Interactive, go home and write stories about how Interactive "has jumped the shark" or has "lost its mojo."
This year, Mashable is writing that SXSWi has lost its way. The piece contends that Interactive's " random, somewhat serendipitous nature is slowly fading away," and says of this year's event: "there was nothing particularly new, fresh or buzzworthy about it."
None of this is new, of course. In fact, Mashable wrote a very similar piece just last year (and just like this year's piece, used the 'jump the shark' phrase in the headline in that piece, too.)
Tech Crunch asked the question back in 2011. The San Jose Mercury News did it a year earlier, in 2010. Venturebeat weighed in on the subject in 2013. That same year, so did Reuters. In 2014, Worldmag wrote:"Has SXSW lost its culture-making mojo?"
There are more examples, but you get the idea -- which is that writing SXSWi-has-lost-its-soul stories is not a new idea.
But they are probably going to keep coming, anyway.
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