Welcome, Alfred!

I agree re: the media attendees should pay. Some conferences are media-centric from the start: E3 is (was, I guess) an example. I could see vendors or the show itself sponsoring attendees to that kind of show.

But the conferences I generally attend are usually specific to a particular topic, and are targeted towards practitioners. When I’m able to attend, I’m paying to get a compressed technical introduction or overview: they are educational events, not advertising fests or love-ins. As I said in my original post, I’d be pretty ticked off to find that someone who isn’t a real “learner” or contributor got a free invite to a session I paid for.

Has Scoble received free invitations to previous incarnations of MIX? If so, then “weaning” him of this expectation probably needed somewhat special handling, and maybe that was lacking. Otherwise…well, he doesn’t have my sympathy.