The Pueblo Grande Museum Auxiliary has decided, for the first time, to offer credentials to bloggers, allowing them to attend and cover the 30th Anniversary Indian Market in Phoenix, Arizona on December 9th and 10th. The blogger credential, which will offer the same access as a standard media pass, is available by contacting the Auxiliary’s Public Relations office at pr@pgmarket.org.
I wrote about the specifics of the market and the credential in my post at LiquidNixon.com. For this discussion, I am more intrigued by the potential implications to the blogosphere and on public relations. This is the first instance that I have heard of where credentials were issued to bloggers for anything other than a political event. While I believe that we are a long way off from having major media attractions, such as sporting events credential bloggers, it makes sense to me that smaller events would look to blogs to help inform the public.
As I documented in my LiquidNixon.com post, Isaac Curley, director of the Pueblo
Grande Museum Indian Market said the following:
"We recognize the importance of bloggers as a critical part of the new media. We
hope that credentialing bloggers will show our support for regional and topical
blogs and also increase publicity for the Market to benefit the Native American
artists and the Pueblo Grande Museum."
What he is saying, and I agree, is that credentialing bloggers is a win-win scenario.
The blogs gain by allowing them better coverage of the events that are specific
to their subject matter. This is especially true for topical, as opposed to regional
blogs. For example, covering the Pueblo Grande Museum Indian Market would especially
benefit those blogs which are specific to arts or Native American subjects since
that coverage would be of specific interest to readers of those blogs. At the same
time, the events themselves gain since the targeted nature of blogs allows them
to create publicity and generate buzz in the specific communities who are most interested
in their message. This can also have the effect of increasing the relevance of the
event’s website in search engines, boosting its search engine rankings and thus
increasing visibility.
I have a number of questions that I would like to pose to the DKos community on
this subject:
- Are there additional benefits for an organization in issuing credentials to bloggers
that have not been discussed here?
- What are the disadvantages of issuing blogger credentials and how can the impact
of these disadvantages be minimized?
- Should bloggers be issued specific credentials or should they get standard media
credentials?
- Are there any restrictions that should be placed on credentialed bloggers which
are not placed on other members of the media?
- Can (or should) we, as members of the blog community (whether bloggers or not) do
anything to encourage or discourage the practice of credentialing bloggers?
- Do you know of any other instances where bloggers have been credentialed? How did
it work out? What was done well? What could have been better?
Questions 3 & 4 are partially summarized in the survey below: