So I'm at this big outdoor festival that I haven't been to in years in a city I never visit.  I don't know anyone there. What I do know is that I am supposed to have media credentials for the event, which basically means that I get to sit in a chair I didn't have to bring in myself, I will be close enough to the stage that I can see the artists, and I can take pictures during the first two songs.  I am also on the after show backstage list, so I can bother some of the musicians in person.  Sounds simple enough until the wires get crossed.  Whoever was maintaining the great list of names took me off the media list when they put me on the after show list.  Straightening this out involved wandering through a packed crowd to two different welcome tents on opposite sides of the area.  I cross paths with someone else who is having the same problem as we made our ways back and forth, so we decided to pool our (lack of) resources.  A staff member comes out and says we are on the media list because they don't keep a separate list of the musician's guests.  So even though we are on the media list it doesn't mean we are actual media.  My compatriot starts freaking about how her editor is going to kill her if she doesn't deliver some pictures, I start thinking it's a scene from "Catch 22."  You are media but not really.  I mull that over while almost walking into a large man hurtling toward me with a sloshing glass of red wine that I didn't see because I was typing notes for the review into my BlackBerry.

What is media now?  Who really is "legitimate media," and does legitimacy even matter?  I might not be legitimate to some because I write for websites and work with a radio show.  There is no paper involved and having the stuff you write printed on paper seems to still hold a certain amount of status.  I did write for two publications, but both quit printing because people just picked up the print copies and left them lying around for cleanup crews to pick up.  Most people were reading online, so why deal with printing costs. What constitutes "working" media now?  If you are a writer, photographer, or if you do videos it could be argued that you are constantly working because you are constantly observing, and anything you see or hear could end up becoming content that you might get paid for.

There used to be a pretty cut and dry criteria for legitimacy.  You wrote for a newspaper in a city that had more than one traffic light, or you worked for a radio station that reported their playlists to one specific trade publication.  Now newspapers have web sites that are full of contributions from regular people, and the websites have more readers than the actual paper.  The trade publication that bestowed legitimacy on a small group of radio stations folded, so musicians and record companies are scratching their heads in confusion, because now they have to look at all the radio stations, online streams, blogs and webmags, and combinations of all of the above and figure out which ones are worth the time and energy. It's a crapshoot too.  The dork who shot a video with his flea market camera could be a multimedia star when that video goes viral.  The Internet radio show that had five listeners last month now has 500,000.  Remember when you told them that you couldn't talk to them because they were too small?  Oops!

It seems that if you have a consistent profile - a pretty big body of work over a period of time - you can get credentials.  Some places have weird criteria though.  I've been to two recent events where your camera had to be big.  I thought this was rather strange since people with small cameras don't get in the way as much, and when most of your readers are looking at it on a screen the size of a piece of paper at best, how much does high resolution perfection matter?  I learned my lesson though.  Now, when size matters I just call up a friend who has a bigger one.

User generated media is gaining an increasingly large amount of the audience.  People enjoy the stuff other people do more than the over-researched sterilized formula product "legitimate" media is delivering.  What that probably means is that we are all "working media" now, and we are spending our days trolling for content.  While I was wandering around the park at the festival I saw couples snuggling close as they watched the action on stage through their camera viewfinder.  I stood next to a guy who was texting the set list and a running commentary on the show to a friend who was stuck at work.  People jostled for camera angles and thumbed away on their smart phones.  I talked to someone who had moved from his stage-front seat to the back of the field so he could watch the performance on the big video screen. "I'm just more used to that," was his explanation.  Everybody was covering the event, their audiences could have been one or one thousand.  Who knows, and who would want the job of sorting it out?  Meanwhile, we take pictures of each other taking pictures of each other, while somewhere on a distant stage, the band plays on.