My frustration with getting my cameraman badged for Digital Experience which is run by Pepcom is such at this point that our coverage of their event this year is in jeopardy.  This all stems from my having hired what they term a non accredited cameraman.

What they are telling me is that unless I hire what they qualify as a Professional accredited camera person that they will not issue a badge for that person to attend.  With my budget there is simply no way I can hire another camera person just for their event while every other event has had no issue badging my camera person that I have used for other events this year.

Their policy in my opinion is outdated and really contradicts how they have done business in the past. Because the past two years that we attended their event we did not have an accredited camera person all we were required to submit was what I submitted this year.  It seems that they expect that bloggers/podcasters to have professional accredited videographers working on their staffs ;)

Even more ridiculous is that they invited back our non accredited camera person from last year who we no longer have an affiliation with.

So while they are happy to allow me to attend the event, the support people I have hired are simply not good enough to meet their attendance requirements.  They say because my hired camera person is not full time in the business he cannot be badged to attend.  This is a can of worms because how many bloggers have full time camera professionals on staff or can afford to hire someone that meets their standards. 

Their policy on my support people covering this event is based solely on the assumption that somehow non accredited camera people are going to be an issue, and will cause the vendors paying to exhibit at the event to become upset even though they have approved me to interview their vendors.

The vendors we interviewed last year were not upset with our coverage in fact I have dozens of letters of Thank You for our professional coverage.  Not to mention the 5 plus million viewer impressions we delivered the folks at Digital Experience alone from our coverage in 2008.

So I am now in the less than envious position of having to tell the 23 vendors that have asked us to come see them this year that we will be their but without our cameras.  Pepcom is living in an old media mind set. I understand their need to keep their event professional but their policy on who can and cannot get a badge to cover their event is beyond ridiculous. You would think our coverage last year and the year before would be merit enough.

Instead of embracing Bloggers, Podcasters and understanding our challenges of covering their event they have stuck their head in the sand and are making demands that most bloggers  cannot provide on the budgets we have . Being the economy is in the pits you would think they would be reaching out to more non-traditional media.

As I explained in my podcast we work like dogs at these events, the cost to attend and the actual logistics for sites like mine are significant. So at this point there is no guarantee that I will be providing coverage this year at Digital Experience and will have to inform the vendors that are expecting to see us that the staff at Pepcom are not willing to badge the guy running the camera.

What I really thinks this boils down to is this. Pepcom may say they are blogger friendly, but what in fact they make the hurdles people have to jump through high enough that most avoid the event. While they have no problem badging Fox, NBC etc they do have a problem badging those of us in New Media.