Central to the “blog revolution” for a few years was the idea that so-called mainstream media — or MSM — was no longer entitled to a monopoly on news coverage. Professional journalists would no longer have a lock on the news, some bloggers said, because the Internet made the proverbial guy at home in his pyjamas as powerful as, say, Peter Jennings on the evening news.
But Stephen Wellman pointed out on his blog at Information Week that even the revolution produces A-lists and B-lists:
I just received an invitation to “the industry’s first BlogWorld and New Media Expo.” What’s interesting is that the only people who can get in with a media pass are traditional press. Just what kind of blog and new media show is this?
As the expo noted: Press credentials are open only to accredited members of the professional media and will require submission of articles and verification that you intend to write for a publication on the conference.
So how do you determine who’s legitimate? I asked Rick Calvert, organizer of the expo. (See his comments on the Information Week blog as well):
“The criteria basically is whether you’re there to strictly cover the event as a journalistic assignment or are you there to actually learn to improve your craft? It’s no different than if you go to a journalism convention… unless you’re there assigned to specifically cover the event.”
But don’t bloggers tend to cover everything they show up at? They seem to go coverage-happy, in fact, when the subject is blogging. Calvert said he and someone he’s working with to accredit bloggers will review who is there to cover the event and who might be trying to get a free pass by claiming to cover the event. So what’s the criteria?
“There’s no doubt it’s a subjective call. It is a difficult thing to do.”
If you’re thinking of going, and are willing to pony up, the expo is happening Nov. 8-9 at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Calvert has 400 people signed up now, but is expecting 4,000, he said.
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5 comments so far
Of course the irony makes for a good story to point this out, but if every person who was attending a blogger conference was a blogger and entitled to a press pass - how could all the expenses of such a big event be covered? Of course, it could if you were able to get tons of sponsorship dollars - but to do it on the scale Rick is working towards would be impossible. He has been working on it for many, many months personally investing in making it happen.
And no, not all blogger attended events go coverage happy - despite the huge percentage of bloggers at Gnomedex and Wordcamp recently, not everyone actually wrote something on the events - often just too busy to write about everything… Wordcamp charged a nominal fee to cover costs (though it didn’t cover full costs) and Gnomedex charged a full conference fee and I don’t know of one blogger who was really upset about paying.
[disclosure - I like Rick, and am supporting his event and probably speaking there - I also organize events and have had to deal with this same challenge - I only saw this post because Shlomo just twittered it]
- Posted by Chris Heuer[...] Source:Valleywag The blogger-focused BlogWorld tradeshow and expo in Las Vegas is only giving press passes to “accredited members of the professional media” — not to the bloggers trying to usurp them. [Reuters] [...]
- Posted by Media Relations: The blogger-focused BlogWorld tradeshow and … »TechAddressActually, it’s not that hard in practice to handle the problems of how to do an event for bloggers and not give everything away. I chair Web Video Summit for Jupitermedia, which has a strong contingent who blog. Our policy posted at press registration is
“Video and other bloggers are welcome to register as press if you regularly cover our topics.”
In practice, we issued press passes generously and weren’t taken advantage of.
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- Posted by Dave BursteinDave, how many people attended the summit in total? Also curious about how many got press passes, bloggers and otherwise? Tx!
- Posted by Robert MacMillanThank you for the even handed post the link and the phone call Robert. Thanks to Chris for coming to our defense 8).
Our traditional media PR company could have definitely worded their invitation better and if I had seen it before it was sent out, it would not have happened.
As Robert pointed out I have responded to this at Stephen’s blog and several others now. Most of the time someone in the comments section gets it pretty quickly.
NAB and NNA don’t let every journalist in for free as journalists are their audience. We view our event the same way. We are a media event designed to help new media “pro-sumers” and professionals hone their craft and effectively monetize their content.
One of the ways to do that is to get them all more main stream press coverage which is what we engaged a traditional PR company Bohle Inc. to do.
We also have Brian Solis at FutureWroks specifically tasked to help us vette bloggers who request a media credential. His name was included in the release. I am a blogger myself and am involved in that process as well.
Chris is right if we let everyone in for free there wouldn’t be an event. Gnomedex is a great analogy. It cost $695 to attend and I happily paid it. It never occurred to me to apply for a press credential even though I planned to (and did)live blog the event. It was worth every penny.
In the end we said something stupid and got called for it.
If you want to see someone who worded his media credential policy see the PME’s policy here: http://www.newmediaexpo.com/press.htm
I hope you can all join is this November 8-9 in Vegas.
Blog on!
- Posted by Rick CalvertRick Calvert
CEO & Co-founder
BlogWorld & New Media Expo