When Boise's fourth-annual Treefort Music Fest gets underway Wednesday, around 200 writers, bloggers and reporters will be covering the event.
Kymm Cornelison is the festival’s publicity director. She says music news outlets from places like Portland, Seattle, Denver, San Francisco and Los Angeles are among those represented.
More media will cover Treefort in 2015 than ever before. The number of credentials has doubled since the festival's first year. As coverage has grown, so has the festival.
“Boise is its own little island,” Cornelison says. “We’ve got the bigger cities around us but they’re still eight hours out. It’s really important that we get people from all those other bigger hubs here to experience this and start talking about it in the bigger hubs.”
Besides receiving applications for media credentials, Treefort officials have also reached out to certain media members in hopes of recruiting them to cover the five-day event.
Cornelison says the goal is to reach more music fans outside the West and Northwest.
“People who have not necessarily been to Boise before, or Idaho in general,” she says. “We love the Northwest but we do want to start skirting out towards the east, as well. And of course, we’re always after the really big publications.”
So far, the biggest names in music news - like Rolling Stone or Spin - haven’t dispatched reporters to Boise. Cornelison feels like momentum around Treefort is building, and it’s a matter of time before the festival catches their attention.
For members of the press attending this week, festival organizers have set up the basement of the El Korah Shrine as a media center. The Shrine will also serve as a concert venue again this year.
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