Two years ago the Parnassus Group helped CEA determine which bloggers would be granted press credentials at the 2007 International Consumer Electronics Show (or, CES), which is the largest electronics trade show in the world.
“Who gets a press pass?” is more than an academic exercise. Many trade shows and conferences offer free passes to members of the press in exchange, implicitly, for coverage.
Deciding who gets in for free and who doesn’t has been pretty simple for a long time—either you were a member of the press or you weren’t. But lately the lines have become a lot more blurry, and it can be hard to decide whether someone deserves free access or not.
How do you make that call? What makes people “press” anymore?
Traffic
The internet is a great democratizing medium. Anyone can build a large audience online for a fraction of the cost of publishing a daily newspaper.
But that doesn’t mean that the people they reach are any less real, or any less important.
I think that any system that encourages subscriptions or memberships is going to yield a more engaged audience. This is more valuable than an audience of large but transient web visitors.
But just having an audience doesn’t mean that someone will follow the rules. How do you differentiate between the two?
Last year, CEA gave people different badges if they were “Bloggers” than those who where “Press.” There wasn’t much difference between the two, except that it helped the people at CES booths determine what kind of publisher they were talking to. That’s one solution for now, but making that distinction is going to get harder and harder.
Footprint
Another tricky aspect of online publishing is that it rears its head in weird places. Someone may have only a few hundreds blog readers, but 20,000 fans on their Facebook page. That’s still 20,000 people she can broadcast to.
She may have 500 followers on Twitter, and 3,500 people following her del.icio.us bookmarks RSS feed. Again, still enough people to matter, but coming from a weird source.
The lesson we learned working for CEA (disclosure: I am the New Media Manager at the Parnassus Group) is that one number is not sufficient online. There are a myriad of ways to judge the popularity and influence of an online publisher, and it is important to understand how large their footprint is.
In the end, it still comes down to how many people you can reach. It just might be a little scary to realize that with a little hard work just about anyone can build an audience large enough to make them matter.
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Eat Sleep Publish is a Seattle-based blog that explores the difficulties and opportunities currently facing the publishing industry. 
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