WNBC's NYC "Blogger Summit"

[Photo courtesy of wnbc.com]

Last night, WNBC pulled together 130 New York City bloggers for a "Bloggers Summit" for a discussion about the future of TV news and blogging. It was a fascinating event and we'll be especially interested to see how many blog posts appear about it over the course of the day since, by definition, it should blogged about extensively. (In terms of fellow Brooklyn bloggers, you can check out OTBKB's take on the event here and A Brooklyn Life's impression of it here.) The station was particularly interested in sharing its vision of how Channel 4 and bloggers can work together, although the model could be applied more broadly.

Channel Four wants stories from bloggers and would give bloggers credit for them (hint to NYC print media outlets). The execs and producers at Channel Four clearly see working with bloggers as a winning step, partly because they understand that more and more people are getting their information from blogs and that bloggers are filling vital niches. They offered survey results that showed that only four percent of the bloggers present considered local TV news their "most helpful" source of information and that not a single blogger put local TV news websites at the top of his or her list. (Nowhere is the vital role of bloggers more clear than in Brooklyn, where stories would go uncovered or would be severely under-covered were it not for the efforts of bloggers.) In any case, the meeting was clear recognition that we're all official parts of the information food chain. You can read WNBC's item on the event here and there is a youtube vid of the event posted here (embed above).

We saw many bloggers whose work we have long admired and some whose blogs we did not know about. The woman who sat to our right, for instance, was a senior citizen who produces a blog called Barb's Beauty Tips for Babes Over 60. Who knew?