By Mika Kennedy

Conventions (or "cons", in the fannish parlance) like Creation Entertainment's SupernaturalCon in Burbank, CA aren't looking to secure their next legion of television-watching prospectives.  They're not like San Diego's Comic-Con, with a warehouse full of vendors, promotional panels, or enticements designed to help you remember their name.  If you've been to Comic-Con in the last six years, you're there for what's to come--television's new spread of genre shows this season, exciting upcoming developments in extant genre shows, the newest set of genre tropes graving the silver screen this summer.

Supernatural's Burbank Con isn't like that, nor does it try to be.  "News" doesn't factor in, and rarely does "new" in any sense.  If anyone was there to glean some juicy spoilers, talk candidly and specifically about what the next few episodes will have to offer, they walked away empty-handed.  And if you stop to think about it, it makes sense:  within the realm of single-series fan conventions it's a sure bet that your target audience, by virtue of the rapid-fire dissemination of info via Twitter, Tumblr, and LiveJournal (the dinosaur of this triumvirate)--they already know the hottest info you could possibly offer.  There's almost no point in bringing any news to the table, because your audience already heard it from Ask Ausiello; they Tweeted a producer and received an answer; someone hiding in the bushes in Vancouver Instagrammed paparazzi photos of that day's scenes and now the entire Internet's already seen it.  Should you disregard this ineffable truth and choose to divulge something at the con, the fans on the outside will absolutely hear about it before half the audience does, thanks to the more nimble-fingered Twitterers in attendance.  And I can speak from experience on that one--the first thing one of my Internet pals said to me when she learned I'd been to the Burbank Con was, "SO YOU SAW JENSEN IN A HOODIE???"