The author of the Deep Rough recently wrote about his experience applying for media passes to the 2007 Sybase Classic, an upcoming LPGA event. Unfortunately, though, the agency handling public relations for the event turned down the request.

Not too long ago I used the LPGA’s media site to request media credentials for an upcoming LPGA event in New Jersey. The media credentials (for those of you who may not be familiar) would simply give me the the opportunity to properly cover the event, do some interviews with players, event coordinators, take some pictures, etc.
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Ok, so the event may be losing $30 in ticket sales. But wouldn’t some positive publicity for a tour that isn’t exactly the most popular in the country be worth more than $30? I can understand not wanting to hand out credentials to organizations who may shine negative light on your business. I’m just not sure why you wouldn’t want to foster ‘grass roots’ coverage of your events by the blogger community. It’s not like someone blogging the event would go there and then say it was an awful experience.

After further email exchanges, Deep Rough found out from the contracted firm, Octagon, that it was explicitly against the LPGA’s policies to grant media passes to bloggers. read more

There’s a dustup going on on the technosphere side of things; Jason Calacanis, previously of Weblogs and Netscape, was recently asked by a journalist at Wired to do an interview. Like Dave Winer, one of the pioneers of RSS technology, and one of the earliest evangelists for blogging, Jason Calacanis refused to do the interview unless it was through email only.

Wired’s journalist, in turn, refused these conditions, and the interview has been scrapped..

While we can debate over how self-important some bloggers feel, or, how journalists “routinely” mangle interviews and put quotes out of context, there’s one thing this piece makes clear, and that is doing an interview with a blogger — and one with a significant audience — isn’t without its perils.

To wit, Jason Calacanis blithely puts it: “Besides I have 10,000 people come to my blog every day — i don’t need wired to talk to the tech industry.”

And I think that makes all the difference.

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Let me tell you a couple of stories. The names have been changed to protect the innocent.

The Athlete
There was once an athlete who was great at training. He could thrash his personal bests, decimate the opposition and make his peers believe he was a superman.

In training.

On the day, he was a mess. His diet was wrong, he had no idea what the opposition was planning to do or what they did in any particular situation. So he did what everyone else did. He hired a coach and started to perform infinitely better. Perfect planning prevented a piss poor performance. read more

A snowball has been growing over the past month. Big players are creating Digg-style social apps left, right and center. I’ve been waiting for the snowball to slow down so I could write a piece on all them, but it just keeps growing and gaining momentum. So I decided to just go for it. I wonder how many new ones will pop up before I finish writing…this…sentence.

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If you’re a blogger with a decent readership and a prominent search engine ranking, you’ve probably encountered someone like me. Someone who sends you emails asking you to write something nice about one of my clients.

If you’ve got a huge readership you probably get a truck load of these requests.

Why?

PRs already have access to huge databases (formal and informal) of pretty much all the media in their country/market that could write about the client. Most of them have to speak with the media and have good relationships with them as well.

Why would they want or need to go to the trouble of finding a blog like yours, reading it for an hour or so, finding your contact details and then “pitching you” on their client?
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Dan Rather was recently interviewed at South By South West, an interactive media extravaganza, where he was asked his opinions on bloggers and blogging.  Mr. Rather, ever the southern gentleman, had a few interesting things to say about blogging, in spite of the role it played in his downfall as a CBS correspondent and lead anchor. read more

MySpace.com announced it is teaming up with The New York Times for its second annual “Win A Trip With Nick” African reporting competition, offering one college or graduate student as well one middle- or high-school teacher the opportunity to accompany Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Nick Kristof on an expedition to Africa. MySpace is creating a customized community to engage users in the contest and offer video from the expedition, raising awareness about the challenges facing strife-ridden African nations.

“Traveling through Asia and Africa when I was in college was a turning point in my life,” said New York Times’ op-ed columnist and award winning journalist, Nick Kristof. “My hope is that the student and teacher who join me this summer will be similarly affected and will share their discoveries about Africa and its people with their peers and their students.” read more

The adoption of social media technology by mainstream media organizations continued as Pluck Corporation announced that USA Today has incorporated Pluck SiteLife and Pluck BlogBurst into its newly redesigned USAToday.com site.

Pluck BlogBurst and SiteLife solutions are designed to help publishers actively engage readers and greatly expand open content offerings to build online audiences. Pluck SiteLife helps publishers solicit audience interaction and gather reactions related to their site content through an integrated social media platform that plugs easily into branded digital properties. Pluck SiteLife includes reader blogs, photo sharing, content ratings, reader comments, personas, forums and more. Pluck BlogBurst is the world’s largest blog syndication network, with more than 3,400 top-tier blogs serving a vast breadth of content to major news outlets, magazines and broadcast networks worldwide. read more

Jason Kaneshiro wrote an interesting post at Webomatica entitled “I Don’t Read Newspapers, But I’d Read Your Blog” in which he challenges Steven Rattner’s (WSJ) viewpoint that Americans are less interested in ‘real news’ and more concerned with entertainment and gossip.

It’s all a response to the ever declining readership of newspapers. Jason’s headline sums up his desire to read the news, but to do it using a medium that offers greater choice and interactivity.

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A few months ago, top news agency Reuters was severely criticized for publishing digitally altered photos from Lebanon. The unfortunate incident is now better known as the “Adnan Hajj photographs controversy,” leaving a dark blemish in the use of digital photography for news reportage. read more