The National Press Club is the latest organization to feel the heat generated when bloggers and the press collide. Last time, it was the Brookings Insitution's March 22 panel on "The Impact of the New Media," which ran into trouble because the initial lineup of panelists from Blogolia included only gossip blogger Wonkette (presumably representing the liberal end of the spectrum because she talks about sex a lot) and the hermaphroditic (in terms of press and blogging) Andy Sullivan, plus a pair of well-known conservative bloggers commenting on the event from home. After an extensive brouhaha and lots of indignant emails and open letters, Brookings added a few liberals to balance out the essentially meaningless discussion.

The Press Club ran into trouble when it snagged the now-infamous Jim Guckert/Jeff Gannon as the headliner for its panel, "Who Is a Journalist?" The initial lineup included the ubiquitous Wonkette, again, presumably, as the trash-talking liberal, and several institutional press types. The panel's question drew an immediate answer from traditional journalists: "Not Jeff Gannon," and bloggers were equally adamant that he's not a blogger either, at least not until a month or so ago. Bloggers — primarily on the left — were annoyed both by Wonkette's seemingly inevitable inclusion and the implication that Gannon is a blogger.

The conflict first erupted when press trade magazine Editor & Publisher ran a belligerently skeptical story about Gannon's invitation to the Press Club, and NPC vice president Jonathon Salant responded indignantly in the letters section of the media mosh pit know as Romenesko's Media News. Although Salant defended the decision on the basis of Gannon/Guckert's news value, the original NPC description of the event left the impression that GG was participating because of his expertise on the subject rather than because of his notoriety. It has since been rewritten to emphasize the question of how he got his lifetime day pass into the White House, and Salant emphasized in an email to me that the question of access was to be the panel's primary focus.

In addition to rewriting the blurb, the NPC responded by adding two more bloggers to the panel: Media Bistro's Garrett Graff, who edits the Fishbowl DC blog for the company and was the first blogger admitted to the White House press room, and Matt Yglesias, a modestly liberal blogger who won a staff position at The American Prospect magazine on the strength of his writing. At present, with a week to go before the event, those three remain Blogolia's ambassadors to Pressworld.