After reading Suw Charman’s masterful and insightful post, Where’s the we in WeMedia?, I wanted to make a few comments myself.
The We Media conference was a joke. it did everything to exclude bloggers, online activists, citizen journalists — the entire cluetrain — from participating.
(Suw Charman calls it all participatory media while other call it consumer generated media.)
Blogging requires only a couple things but the stumbling blocks are huge: literacy and access to the Internet.
What blogging — participatory media — has going for it is zero barrier to entry, after you get past illiteracy and the digital divide.
Okay, We Media was rife with barriers to entry.
The fee. The geographical location (bloggers don’t do location). The defensive nature of MSM while they’re trying to be so generous and participatory (actually, it’s more like keeping your friends close and your bloggers closer).
It was all so transparent to me and nobody bought it. That said, it was super important, this We Media conference. Why? Because it was an opportunity to see how hungry, how scared, how afraid, how obsolete, how vulnerable, and how exposed journalists, reporters, columnists, and the like are.
Especially if that reporter is JUST a reporter and not also an Economist, Scientist, or other expert.
The days of journalism being its own expertise is going going gone. One will need to have expertise and then start reporting — start participating.
Comments (3)
hello
Hi!
“The We Media conference was a joke. it did everything to exclude bloggers, online activists, citizen journalists — the entire cluetrain — from participating.”
Well… not everything. We did give away 20% of our “open to the public seats” to independent, academic and entrepreneurial media, in some cases paying for their travel and lodging expenses. Though space was tight, half of the media we credentialed to cover the event were bloggers. We held a pre-conference session for bloggers, our fellowship recipients and nonprofit participants on May 2. Dave Sifry, Scott Heiferman, and Global Voices were major participants. So we didn’t do quite as thorough a job as you claim to exclude the entire cluetrain. Thanks, though.