The Bigger Tent

Wednesday, 9/24 in NYC, Social Media Club is going to welcome Dan Patterson, a blogger, podcaster, and professional journalist, and Ann Cooper, who teaches at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. Ann has worked as a reporter for newspapers, magazines, and National Public Radio, and was the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Recently, Ann published this article at the Columbia Journalism Review:

CJR: The Bigger Tent

And so it went for a few years, bloggers versus journalists; a fight over much more than semantics, a fight to see whether the big tent of American journalism would become a bigger tent to accommodate the newcomers and their new ideas. Who belongs in that tent, and who gets to decide who’s in it? Put another way: Who is a journalist? It’s a tantalizing question, but it’s hardly worth asking anymore.

This is the subject of our meeting tomorrow night. There are journalistic acts happening everywhere online, by bloggers and journalists alike. How do we know the difference, when is the difference important, and who decides?

On a side note, I’ve been blogging for 10 years, but not until I got picked up by a mainstream business publication did I start getting offers of “press passes.” So it seems the lines are still pretty blurry.

UPDATE: More food for thought from Max Gladwell:BlogWorld 2008: The Line Between Blogging and Journalism 
This is an important question, and I hope you’ll attend if you’re in NYC, and support our chapter there.

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