When I arrived at the TWiT studios, I didn’t expect to meet Veronica Belmont. As a follower of finer podcasts and online media, I’ve been following Veronica’s work for some time and have learned a fair bit from her tech and entertainment reviews. See, Veronica Belmont is a personality. She’s part of a new caste of online personalities led (in a cosmic sense) by Robert Scoble, for whom the chic comes in the project, not the network. Veronica’s audience follows her accordingly, learning of her work not from her employer but from her feeds. She has loyal fans, friends, and followers across the net.
She boasts admirable skill as a producer; she’s smart, intuitive, and has a keen understanding of communicating the complex simply on air. But what I have learned from Veronica is the importance of personality. There is no pretense in a Veronica Belmont broadcast, no arrogance. She reads as someone deeply in touch with her viewers, not as an audience, but as friends.
Veronica is co-host of the Sword and Laser, a sci-fi/fantasy podcast née book club with Tom Merritt. I was lucky to catch them both in a show meeting on the set itself and managed to make this photograph of Veronica with her great dragon, Lem. Thanks, Veronica, for taking the time to share with a fan.