All the news that's fit to tweet

Last night I and several other local bloggers attended the Atlanta Press Club's panel on Ethics and the New Media, which sounded like a sexy topic but wound up being surprisingly boring. In a wonderful display of the wide gulf between old and new media, several of us Twittered the event live. Here, in all it's typo-filled stream of consciousness glory, is my twitterstream of the APC event (which I arrived at somewhat late thanks to traffic):

Just got here and I'm already bored. Polite laughter at misguided jokes, etc.

There is reverb on this guy's mic and it is making me homicidal.

Blogging is "fraught with danger" for Equifax?

How has business adapted to the rise of blogging? Only one answer: not fast enough.

Cue worrying about competitive corporate PR sabotage in 3...2...1...there it is!

This annoying woman from the AJC again? I remember being unimpressed by her last year.

Yes, "Huffington Report" is so established now that you got its fucking name wrong!

Thank you for pointing out most people see little
accountability/credibility in the "real press".

Equifax guy seems surprised some bloggers want to create and follow their own code of ethics. Imagine that!

This guy just got WAY too philosophical for the poor beleaguered journos

Expectation of personal authenticity in the blogosphere- we want to know about the CEO's cat, totally

I'm 5 minutes away from getting sick of this and going to find a drink.

Nevermind, question time. Let's hope this is when the fight starts.

I think we found the coked up journo in the room.

Where is our buddy Susannah? This guy's accent reminded me. (Ed: infamous blogosphere-hating journalist Susannah "vere ees ze credibeelity" Capelouto was, sadly, a no-show and thus SpaceyG did not have the chance to wrestle her to the ground and rip out her weave.)

You think any journos are covering this live? Nope. Bloggers rock the blackberry/iphone/N95/wifi yo!

Now some bald guy talking about how awesome he is and everyone hates him for it.

Shut up and stop talking, baldy! Ooh, someone on the panel just zinged him for it.

AJC lady very upset to see old media called out. Nearly apoplectic.

Blogs counteract media consolidation--good point.

We're in the nascent stage of the blogosphere? Is that you Ted Stevens? Did you just discover the series of tubes?

Ok I'm over this.

And then we left and went to Manuel's to dissect it all. The good: the press seems more receptive to bloggers than they did a year ago, or rather they seem less clueless about blogging and therefore terrified by it than they were a year ago. There were still serious WTF moments, most notably when an older guy in the back of the room started talking about how we're in the "nascent stages" of the blogosphere and how it may all be ruined once someone starts trying to make money off of this newfangled toy. Um, hello sir and welcome to the 21st century. We're very sorry you somehow missed the last 5 or 6 years, but here's a quick primer: blogs have been around since the NINETIES and some have made money for years without any real problems with doing so.

I also think the panel should not have included the dual tracks of ethics in blogging for media and for business--the two issues are too disparate and complicated to be considered at the same time. The fact is that corporate blogging is its own animal and should be treated as such. Lumping it all together just made it seem superficial on both counts.

The most interesting metaphor for the whole event was that we were set up in such a way that there was a panel with microphones, and then people seated at tables in a large room. When they wanted to open it all up to questions, there was a guy walking around the room with a microphone to allow the questioner to be heard. Periodically one of the panelists would refer to "the bloggers here" to hopefully obtain their agreement to something she said, but somehow the mic never seemed to make its way over to the table to allow actual bloggers to speak. But no matter--when the bloggers wanted to be heard, they didn't wait for a mic or raise their hands politely, they just shouted out what they wanted to say.

Ultimately, while it felt like a step in the right direction for Atlanta media, it also felt like a baby step. Sure, nobody was asking about the fall of democracy or wondering aloud how blogging works and where you go to get one. In that sense it was progress. And it was obvious that the AJC representative who was on last year's panel had internalized at least some of what the bloggers had to say because she parrotted back a few helpful lines about "the conversation" going on whether people want it to or not, even as she had a fit later on when the AJC and all old media were criticized and she couldn't spit out a defense. But it was still the same discussion, the same false dichotomies, the same cluelessness that some bloggers might voluntarily assume journalistic integrity principles, etc. Let's just say that true credit and respect for the contributions and ideals of the new media is still but a distant dream.

UPDATED to add some other views of the event from those who were there:
Shelby
Griftdrift