Believe the Hype

Think cool computer animation, boffo CD-ROM games and everything Internet. Think fast: Where is this place?

Silicon Valley? Boston? Seattle?

Try Burbank, Irvine, Culver City and Torrance.

According to a survey by the Bay Area Economic Forum, Southern California-based multimedia companies employ 133,000 workers, more than the Bay Area and New York City combined. The problem is, nobody seems to know--or care.

“We’ve got the companies, we’ve got the jobs, but we don’t have brand awareness,” laments Jim Jonassen, founder of the Los Angeles New Media Roundtable, a consortium of local businesses and politicos that includes Mayor Richard Riordan and City Councilwomen Jackie Goldberg and Ruth Galanter, plus multimedia players such as Disney Online and Mattel Media.

Multimedia, or new media, combines text, animation and sound to create services and products such as CD-ROM games and educational software, as well as digital effects for film, television and Web sites. While Southern California possesses the United States’ largest concentration high-tech industries and commands a global presence in movies and television, it lacks the support industries needed to keep new-media firms afloat, from venture capitalists to attorneys who specialize in start-ups.

“There’s a tremendous convergence taking place here,” says Joel Kotkin, a senior fellow at Pepperdine University’s Institute for Public Policy. “Los Angeles is the only region that brings together both high-tech and a cultural infrastructure.”

But getting these monoliths to “interface,” as a new-media geek might say, has been another matter.

“We have a problem retaining talent because they go off to New York or San Francisco to find cool jobs, not knowing these cool jobs are right in their own backyard,” Jonassen says with such passion that you half expect to hear the evangelical thumping of Java manuals.

To attract this talent, the consortium is planning an advertising blitz and working with City Hall to foster a more nurturing business environment. The group is also developing a Web site that will centralize information about the region’s hundreds of new-media outfits. “A lot of times, companies here don’t even get resumes because high-tech programmers don’t know about them,” says Jonassen. “But if they could go to one place to access every new-media Web site in L.A., that would make a real difference.”

Meanwhile, there’s a search for one of those snappy, groan-inducing catch phrases for what might very well be Southern California’s next economic boom. Jonassen rejects “Silicon Beach,” as “too imitative.” His contender? “The Digital Epicenter,” he says with some heat.