To publish, no. Any fool can publish anything, and it's been that way since printing was invented.

To gather news, however, it's called "press credentials". They get you in: on the working side of the yellow crime scene tape; on the convention floor with the delegates; in the inner offices (or sometimes, the living rooms) of the significant, for interviews.

Used to be, press credentials stood for something: not just the talents of the person holding them, but of the editorial board backing him or her up, and the vetting they did on the raw story before it hit the press.

Where's that in the alternative media?

Mind you, I'm not in favor of imposing further regulation on what attempts to pass itself off as journalism nowadays (and I speak of the mainstream as well as the rest)... This is one of those situations where self-regulation and the pressures of the free market make sense. The incredibly-expanded world of literature is suffering the same throes as the non-fiction sphere: Thanks to the Internet, especially places like lulu.com, any fool can publish anything, and they do. Yet serious readers and reviewers still easily recognize the difference between a self-published work and one which has sufficient talent to have been accepted and vetted by a professional publishing house.

And there's the key word right there: professional. It's not merely whether one is paid for the work -- it's a threshhold of quality.

Take my own involvement in Web-based literature as an example. There are thousands of 'zines like Hiss Quarterly out there. None of the people who produce them are paid, but the best still strive for professional quality because they know the difference. We have a hit-counter embedded in our page code, and once in a while we even check the stats, but we don't use them to measure success. For that, we rely exclusively on the quality of what's submitted, and our own satisfaction with the end product -- a judgment we make in light of a few centuries of precedent.

How much of the blahgosphere can make that claim?