Excerpted from the Los Angeles Business Journal:
The managing editor of Fortune magazine, John Huey, all but dismissed Los Angeles as a major technology center during a dinner speech in Beverly Hills. In town for a promotional event for the magazine, Huey pointed out that most big cities these days have technology hubs of some size, and that LA’s doesn’t especially stand out. Perhaps that helps explain why Fortune only has a single reporter covering the entire region.
Huey and Fortune are hardly alone in the East Coast media’s virtual dismissal of high tech in LA. None of the major national magazines or newspapers regularly cover the industry here.
Does this lack of media attention really matter? Judging from recent venture capital numbers, it can be argued that Southern California is being discovered even without the glowing write-ups. The area was the nation’s third-biggest source of venture funding in the third quarter (after Northern California and New England), according to numbers from PricewaterhouseCoopers.
It would be nice to see those New York editors get the picture.
