City Hall set to admit bloggers to media events

City Hall set to admit bloggers to media events

By Emily Laermer

Published: March 19, 2010 - 3:23 pm

Bloggers should be treated more like journalists, the Bloomberg administration announced this week.

Bloggers who can produce clips to prove they attended six media-only events will be eligible to obtain two-year press passes. Currently the New York Police Department issues one-year passes to print journalists who submit three clippings.

Bloggers Rafael Martinez and Ralph Smith and author Dave Wallace, were stripped of their press credentials after they left their jobs at print media. They called this “inconsistent and constitutionally flawed” in a federal lawsuit they filed against the city's press-credentials policy.

Ed Morrissey, a blogger for conservative opinion site HotAir, agrees that bloggers should be considered journalists. He isn't convinced, however, that enough bloggers will be able to take advantage of this “catch-22,” as he called it. If you do not already have press credentials, this regulation doesn't help get them, he said.

“It's a strange way of getting around the fact that it's always going to be a subjective call to who gets press passes,” he said. “It will come down to who you know.”

Although the city had been apprehensive that the influx of bloggers applying for credentials would overwhelm press briefings, Mr. Morrissey and Norm Siegel, the civil rights attorney who worked on the bloggers' case, don't see this happening.

“You think every blogger in the world is going to want to come to a boring press conference at City Hall,” Mr. Siegel told Crain's Insider online newsletter this week.

A hearing on the new rule is scheduled for April 7. The plaintiffs are expected to settle their suit if the policy goes into effect.

City Hall set to admit bloggers to media events - Crain's New York Business.