CES 2008: Part 3, Bloggers Behaving Badly

I seem to remember there being a big stink about a lot of bloggers complaining that they couldn’t qualify for real press passes to things like CES, and eventually, CES allowed blogger entry. However, my experience at CES was that many bloggers were quite unprofessional, and generally a nuisance. Let me share some of my stories…

First off is a story I saw on Gizmodo (but did not see at the show personally) that really showed what “professionals” those guys are . I thought it mildly clever, but they crossed the line by doing it during a press conference. And, at the amount of effort that individuals put into the show, the move was quite horrible to pull.

For my second example, Creative was giving away some swag after you sat through like a 2 minute demo of their XDock HD (playing ipod videos in HD on your TV). Two bloggers from one of the top 5 tech blogs (I won’t mention names) came up and rudely demanded getting the swag and stated very plainly that they didn’t care at all to look at the product, they just wanted freebies. The booth bunny looked offended and took it in stride and said ‘what’s the magic word?’ to which one of the guy snarled ‘please’ and ran off with his little ticket. Way to be professionals.

And, as a final story, I was talking to some people at a smaller company, and they were complaining that anytime any bloggers came up, they just stated things like ‘send me free stuff and I’ll review it on my blog’ (without taking the time to really check out their product) to which she had no problems with, except for the fact that they only requested items that ran about $600 and she stated she hadn’t heard of most of them, or their sites. After she declined, they ran off not showing any further interest in the company. Granted, there is nothing wrong with reviewing items (and I’d imagine most of the larger sites get everything quite free), she made it sound like extortion. Maybe not the worst thing in the world, but she seemed to think that bloggers were nothing but trouble, and that only real press should be allowed in. They just didn’t leave a good impression

I have nothing against most bloggers, but after CES, I really think that immature behavior really left a lot of people with a bad impression of bloggers as nothing even close to ‘real media’. It only takes a couple of jerks to really drag down the image of bloggers, and I can see at least thing’s like Gizmodo’s actions leading to bloggers not getting any press perks in the future…

Thoughts? Am I being too uptight about people having a little fun, or are these actions inappropriate?