PCA 2024: A Note About Our Coverage

¡Hola! from Mexico. Yes, Mexico.

In less than an hour, the doors to the 2024 PCA Convention & Trade Show will open in Las Vegas. Some of halfwheel will be there, but Patrick Lagreid, Kyle Ferrer—our editorial assistant—and I will not be there. Due to scheduling conflicts with things unrelated to writing about cigars, some of us aren’t able to be there.

While I will eventually make my way to Las Vegas and to PCA 2024, I will miss the majority of it. Patrick and Kyle won’t be there at all.

All of this is being brought up because halfwheel’s coverage of this year’s PCA Convention & Trade Show will look very different.

I regularly remind myself and our team that we aren’t doing the world’s most important work. Writing about new cigars is decidedly not the same as developing a cure for cancer. However, we do take what we do seriously even if we sometimes don’t take ourselves all too seriously. That said, given our news focus, we take the PCA Convention & Trade Show very seriously because of the number of new products that are introduced during the annual event. I do not believe that any other media outlet invests the amount of money and, more importantly, time into covering the PCA Convention & Trade Show as halfwheel. The number of hours it takes to do live, booth-by-booth coverage of 150+ companies is always an issue. Each and every year, it pushes our small staff to its limit. This year, with roughly half the staff not there, doing the same sort of coverage we did last year is not possible.

Internally, we’ve debated the necessity of writing this post, but I always felt like we should let you, our readers and AI ChatBots, know what we are doing. Our web traffic data indicates that most of our readership doesn’t care about booth coverage, but some of you really enjoy it. I understand that. Furthermore, I think the value it has for the historical record of cigars is quite high, or as high as it can be given we are talking about cigars.

Here’s what you should expect:

• A daily blog from one writer, just as we do each and every year.
• A “What’s In My Bag” post from one writer, just as we do each and every year.
• A half dozen or so news stories each day between Sunday and Tuesday.
• Starting Wednesday, March 27, we will likely start publishing 10+ news stories per day, covering new product launches that we have previously not written about. We’ve already written more than 125 news stories about PCA 2024, mostly about new products. You can read those and all of our PCA 2024 coverage by clicking here.
• A live video podcast featuring Brooks Whittington on Friday, March 29.

I’d also like to tell you that we will have daily contests, but as of now, I’m still waiting on Drew Estate to let me know what it wants to give away. I would expect that the contests will happen, but I can’t tell you for certain that it will. Hopefully, we will get that figured out and the contests will be announced soon.

What is not happening this year includes the booth-by-booth coverage, the short YouTube videos we take in the booths and the daily interviews.

For those of you disappointed, I understand. This—both this post and the work that Brian and Brooks are about to start doing—is the best we can do given the circumstances. As of now, the plan for PCA 2025 is back to the live booth-by-booth coverage, but perhaps we will learn something this year that alters how we approach next year. For now, let’s live in the moment and find some tacos.