44 HAPPENING Soho Media Club
Words by Neal Romanek
FEED visits a new media industry networking event in London
wo years ago, at the NAB convention in Las Vegas, Jaisica Lapsiwala and Tomasz Witkowski decided they’d had enough.
participants in the London media scene. Past hosts have been Dropbox, Halo Post Production, Warner Bros. and Dolby Laboratories. Soho Media Club events consist of networking drinks, followed by a panel discussion, followed by more networking drinks. The panels are intentionally diverse, both demographically and professionally. The most recent event, hosted at Dolby Laboratories, featured a sound engineer, a writer/director, the head of COPA90’s programme for developing women’s football (Bex Smith – read our interview with her in this issue), and Dolby’s senior business development manager. The host of each month’s event is invited to
put forth its panelist, but these are quite emphatically not events for brand-building or corporate promotion. PowerPoint presentations are strictly forbidden at the events. Instead panelists are encouraged to draw on their own experience – their own personal stories – and audience members are encouraged to respond in kind. THE FUNDAMENT OF THE SOHO MEDIA CLUB IS MADE UP OF THREE SIMPLE RULES:
The two had been seeing missed opportunities in media industry conferences and networking events for some time, with the same speakers giving the same PowerPoint presentations to the same audiences, over and over (you know the drill). Out of their conversations came a vision for a new type of meetup, one based on openness, a willingness to share and an embracing of diversity – Soho Media Club was born. “Tom and I both are personally passionate about collaboration, inclusion and everyone having a voice,” says Lapsiwala. “From the beginning we both talked about a ‘club’ which was very inclusive and accessible. We wanted to bring back the community feel which seems to have been slightly lost within media, particularly behind the camera. So we saw an opportunity to create a club for media professionals who share our beliefs and who want to make the industry a whole lot better in a very democratic way.” LAST WEDNESDAY OF THE MONTH Launched in July 2019, Soho Media Club takes place in London on the last Wednesday of each month at a mystery venue not revealed until a week before the event. Generally, the hosts are notable
1. You are willing to share ideas 2. You are open to collaboration 3. Everyone has a voice.
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