Lessons from iMeme

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There’s been a lot of debate over the last few years about whether bloggers and podcasters constitute “the media,” or rather, about whether bloggers are journalists and entitled to the same privileges and protections as members of the so-called Old Media.

For purposes of the Fortune iMeme conference, bloggers were definitely journalists, and I discovered at lunch that I wasn’t the only representative of the New Media who’d been offered a press pass. “There’s a press luncheon at 12:30,” the nice young man at the check-in desk explained while one of his colleagues re-printed my badge to correct the spelling of my name. (The “Sallie” part, if you’re interested.)

This was a polite way of saying that the press was not invited to lunch with the speakers and paying delegates. The fifty of us with green “press” ribbons on our badges had our own small room upstairs with a rather elegant buffet and one of the ubiquitous, impeccably-mannered Ritz-Carlton staffers to serve drinks (the non-alcoholic variety). I found myself at a table with John Nail of the blog/news aggregator The Industry Radar, Neerja Sethi of MedicineandBiotech.com, Sam Whitmore of Sam Whitmore’s Media Survey, an FIR listener.

By the time lunch came around, I was already wishing I’d had the time to find out more about the speakers, and that I’d had the list of attendees ahead of time. A real journalist would have done more homework and been better prepared to conduct interviews. Come to that, a real journalist, at least one who covered business and tech regularly, would probably already know most of the people there, and have interviewed them before.

And a real blogger would have been posting from the conference floor, or at least the hotel lobby. Somehow I’ve never mastered the spontaneity of blogging. Blogs are wonderful tools for publication and discussion, but I prefer to do some reflecting before I write.

You really wouldn’t want to read my notes as I take them, with dashes instead of punctuation and my irrelevant personal observations and comments tossed in all anyhow. (Even if you would, I don’t want you to read them.) Besides, I think it’s helpful for the reader to know right away that “the woman in the pink shawl” who asked the question about tensions between platform creators and users about data ownership is in fact Esther Dyson, who proved to ask many valuable questions throughout the conference.

Of course, if I were a real journalist, I’d’ve known who she was before I got close enough to read her name tag. But then, if I were a real journalist, I wouldn’t have spent the night before the conference—and the day after it—finishing the last set of edits on a client’s book manuscript.

After all, David Kirkpatrick didn’t invite me to the conference: he invited Shel and Neville. It was their blogger and podcaster credentials that got me in, not my own. And while I am not really a blogger, a podcaster, or a journalist, I am an FIR correspondent, and corresponding is something I can do.