Being Amber Rhea

Last night, Rusty and I attended an Atlanta Press Club event entitled “New Media”: The Changing Media Landscape. Panelists were Mark Bauer, WSB-TV; Lea Donosky, AJC; Lila King, CNN I-Reporting Team; John Patton, ThePort Network; and it was moderated by Grayson.

The room was packed with people from a variety of traditional media backgrounds, public relations, marketing, and even a few people who just wandered in off the street out of curiosity. Oh, and a bunch of us bloggers sitting in the front row (in addition to a few other bloggers in other parts of the room). J. Brotherlove asked what the median age was of the audience, but it’s hard to say because it was really all over the place. One woman who spoke up and asked a question was a recent college graduate; there were other audience members who had 30+ years experience in the media industry. The room also had a surprising degree of gender and racial diversity.

I “live-twittered” the event to an extent. Most of those tweets showed up in yesterday’s daily Twitter digest posting, and the rest will show up tonight. I also took a bunch of notes in a sort of old-school live-blogging exercise, which I’ll scan and post later.

Grayson did a wonderful job of making the event very unconference-like. I got the feeling that this surprised some of the audience members who may have been expecting a more traditional question-and-answer routine from moderator to panelists, but people got the hang of it quickly and soon were speaking up with nearly as much zeal as at PodCamp Atlanta. Grayson and the panelists kept a good handle on things, not letting any of it spiral out of control (and there was one audience member who, had she gotten her way, I think would have willingly led us all down a dark path of unadulterated blog-bashing).

Overall, I think the event went well. There were a few audience members who were seriously rude and antagonistic, but a pleasant surprise (and in contrast to last week’s Social Media Club event) was that the panelists themselves were open-minded, eager to learn - and willing to call bullshit when they heard it. And they did, in response to some of those aforementioned audience members!

It wasn’t all roses, though, and I’m not going to sit here and give everybody a cookie just because it managed not to come to blows. There were a lot of people in that room who just did not get it (blogs are “entertainment” and apparently bloggers are obsessed with Lindsay Lohan?) and frankly need to wake up and answer the clue phone. There were people who apparently think it’s fine and dandy to say extremely rude, dismissive things about the entire spectrum of blogging, and then expect bloggers to bend over backwards to hand them content and do hard work for them.

But, all in all, it was one of the most productive discussions of this kind that I’ve participated in. I’m hoping that things will continue to get better.

I’ll write more later, going into more detail of specific things that happened and things that were said. Just wanted to get an overview post up for now, though.

Here is the podcast of the event, on the Georgia Podcast Network.

Other posts about the event:

• Rusty: Atlanta Press Club panel podcast/thoughts
• Amani Channel: Hangin’ Out At The Atlanta Press Club
• Griftdrift: Facing the Beast, A Blogger Answers A Few Questions, and A Question For The Traditional Journalists
• Grayson: Shout-Out To MY Social Network Peeps
• Sara: Blogger Navel Gazing

Update: Sara’s post articulates some of the problems I had with many audience members’ assumptions last night. I’ll still probably write about this more later.