MBA Announcements

The Media Bloggers Association Aggregated Feed is Live on PBS.org web site.

The MBA and PBS have once again teamed up to provide an aggregated feed of live-blogging posts for the PBS All-American Forum hosted by Tavis Smiley. More than 40 bloggers, will be covering the action live from Morgan State University in Baltimore, MD. The feed can be found here

Media Bloggers Association to assist PBS in processing requests for media credentials from bloggers.

NEW ROCHELLE, NY, September 14, 2007 – PBS has set aside a limited number of media credentials for bloggers who wish to cover the upcoming "ALL AMERICAN PRESIDENTIAL FORUMS ON PBS” hosted by Tavis Smiley, to be held September 27, 9:00 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. ET at Morgan State University in Baltimore, MD. Candidates scheduled to appear next week are

The dealine announced last month to complete the clean up for the MBA Member database is fast upon us - tomorrow.

I've been sending emails to members for the past month. Those that have not responded have been sent increasingly frantic, obnoxoious, hysterical emails. So, sorry for that but I am going to be very unhappy to learn that we removed someone from MBA membership only because they did not read the emails we've been sending.

As noted in each of these emails - and in the announcements and posts last month - those current members who do not use the special link they've been sent to complete the new "membership profile" form on the new web site by January 15th, 2007 will be purged from our membership list and will no longer be members of the MBA.

I was not quite ready to announce this but as this news is probably going to be mentioned in a major newspaper I figure I had better go ahead and fill you all in tonight. As you know, I've been working on creating new opportunities for bloggers including "access" for bloggers.

Those efforts are now bearing fruit as we have our first high-profile opportunity.

The U.S. District Court in Washington, DC has agreed to provide the MBA with two seats at the upcoming Scooter Libby Trial.

Those members interested to participate need to send me an email
expressing their interest and some preferred dates. Our plan is to put together a schedule of 15-20 bloggers. Each blogger will be given one of our two press credentials for a few days (we can play with exact dates once I have expressions of interest from members). The blogger can either be you or someone who blogs on a group blog you run (technically members of your group blog are already members, something we are sorting out with the new membership database but that is a different matter). I am hoping to create some overlap in the schedule so there is always one "veteran" and one "rookie" in our two seats. Bloggers who participate are expected to crank out a good deal of material and participate in the syndication of the content through the MBA web site.

We are very pleased to announce that after a year of planning and
months of development the new MBA site is live. This is not the
"official" launch so we are not advertising the new site now (we will send out a press release in January). We have a new logo color (blue/ black) which should now being served on your blogs (for those members who have been hosting their own version of the logo be advised that in January we will be requiring all members to link the logo from the MBA server not host it themselves)

It has been several months since I last communicated directly to the entire membership. The reason was simple - there were many things in the works but none of them was complete and I did not want to waste your time with updates on projects that have been moving targets. We are soon going to make up for lost time.