Among the many ways in which the real world hasn’t caught up with the way media is changing, is the treatment that bloggers recieve. In many cases we are treated as second-class citizens, both by the print reporters who feel free to lift our stories without crediting us for developing them and in the lack of access to events as bonafide journalists, which many of us are. We operate on the streets and events without the (minimal) protection afforded by press passes and are sometimes denied access to events on this basis. There is much to be said on this subject in general (particularly on the subject of intellectual theft of our hard work by print reporters), but this is about bloggers being denied press credentials. Every day we go out on the street with a camera or go out to report we can be subject to police or other harassment and have no way to even begin to defend ourselves. (And we know plenty of people that have been harassed and hassled by the police.) Here’s an email we received. While we usually don’t us GL as a medium to communicate with bloggers (that’s what God made email for) we thing this is an issue of interest to the general public and to people who read blogs to get their news. There’s a petition circulating about press credentials for bloggers. If you read blogs, please, please sign it.
ChangeNYC.Org, a new grassroots action network, was formed in part to empower New York City’s blogging community. We feel that as citizen journalists of the New Media, bloggers do a better job covering their neighborhoods, community issues, and local politics than the mainstream media. We are on the ground – in the grassroots – instantly reporting the news as we see it, free of corporate bias and control.
That’s why ChangeNYC.Org is taking a strong stand to support a lawsuit brought by civil rights attorney Norman Siegel on behalf of a City Hall blogger and two other online journalists denied press passes by New York City. We have just begun an online petition calling on the City to reform its press credentialing system to assert and protect the First Amendment rights of bloggers. Please sign the petition below and post a link to it on your blogs, so we can show the City just how many people depend upon the work that you do:
http://www.petitiononline.com/12151791/petition.html
For more information on this lawsuit and the plaintiffs involved, check out this link….ChangeNYC.Org is on the cutting edge of the movement to bring the type of change to New York City the Obama Administration promises to bring to our county. Go to www.changenyc.org to read Our Plan to Change NYC.
These are critical, crucial issues as print media loses its grip on the flow of information and the powers that be struggle to catch up with the rights of citizen journalists who form the very foundation of the information pyramid these days.
4 responses so far ↓
1 PSer // Nov 21, 2008 at 9:01 am
If that’s not the pot calling the kettle black! You steal content from private resources without any “development” giving no credit to the author from whom you stole on a weekly, if not daily basis. I’m in support of blogger’s rights when they afforded to journalists, but I have to laugh that you credit yourself among the group. Perhaps if your stories came from valid resources, perhaps if you did any development what so ever. There is always room for improvement and I hope one day you can count yourself among the hardworking journalists who deserve to be protected.
2 bri // Nov 21, 2008 at 9:36 am
I am absolutely in favor of bloggers having the rights of journalists. But with that right will need to come more responsible reporting – how many posts have bloggers lifted from Park Slope Parents without following their Reporter Guidelines? My words have been lifted from there by bloggers more than once – I’d like credit for things that I write, too.
3 Elaine // Nov 21, 2008 at 1:57 pm
It seems to me to be a question of scale. I have a blog– does that mean I automatically get a press pass to a Madonna press conference? How does a person verify or validate that they aren’t just one of the 8 million joe schmoes who have a blog?
If there were a bloggers Union that had some verification of it’s members (not sure how this would work, # of unique readers? getting other bloggers to vouch for the bloggers credibility? legitimizing that they use proper channels to get their information) the Union could then ask the media community to offer press passes. It would take organizing bloggers, coming up with guidelines and having standards by which you could have the ‘credibility’ to be given a press pass. You would have to apply for an event pass that would be specifically related to their blog. It gets complicated and costly very quickly.
All this said, I’m all for bloggers to have press passes IF and ONLY IF bloggers are held to the same standards of other journalists. Like others have said, this includes giving people proper credit and obtaining permission for posts on public and private email groups.
4 hugh b // Nov 21, 2008 at 4:55 pm
Most bloggers are not “bonafide journalists”.
They do make a significant and important contribution to the diuscourse in this country.
However, “bonafide journalists” have degrees in journalism or a related discipline, years of training, knowledge and an ongoing dialouge with peers about the ethical and other issues that they confront.
How many bloggers have these qualifications?