Real Kato Blog: BlogHer Coverage 6: Saturday Afternoon

This is about the "suffragette journalists" break-out session.

Saturday 2:40 p.m.
Suffragette Journalists
Before the session begins, Arse Poetica finds me and introduces herself! I continue to be supremely flattered that people recognize me and know who I am. Perhaps it's easier because I'm a man, and because Lisa Stone made links to my posts. Anyway, Arse Poetica is from North Carolina too, and we may end up crossing paths again.

This discussion is about "citizen journalism", and the distinction between it and mainstream journalism... and perhaps more importantly, the distinction between it and everyday "blogging". Our panelists are Chris Nolan, Anastasia Goodstein, and Evelyn Rodriguez.

Our moderator is the beautiful and talented Lisa Stone.

I have to admit, I'm not entirely sure what problem we're trying to address here; is it that bloggers are not being heard by traditional media outlets? Or is it that traditional media outlets have a stranglehold on the flow of information to the masses?

There's a lot of talk about how to be a better "journalist", so that mainstream media is more likely to listen. But I don't know if we really discuss how to change the rules of the game, along the lines of what we discussed in the opening session. Why isn't there a non-traditional community of fact-checkers and editors working for free, in the same way that bloggers are working for free as the writers? This might be the one time I have something to say that doesn't get expressed by anyone else, but I feel a little out of my element here because most of the people talking are current or former professional journalists. And I'm not even sure I'm paying attention to the correct topic. So not wanting to talk out of my ass, I stay quiet. But as I think about my free blogger-editors (beditors?) idea more, I think it's a good one.

At the end, someone asks for strategies on getting blog material into traditional media, and I'm not sure we get very good general solutions about that. It's suggested that we simply pepper the newspaper editors with polite and well-written emails, but my thought is that we need to change the way news gets reported to begin with, so that the newspapers have to respond by reaching out to bloggers. I think that's starting already, and we just have to foster that change.

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