The recently completed 7th Annual Wine Bloggers Conference in Santa Barbara brought together wine bloggers from across the country. By all accounts, it was a rousing success. How do you know it was a success? Wine Publicists were there.

You can count on wine publicists showing up where the ink is. That’s a guarantee. But you can also bet that it hasn’t been lost on a single wine publicists both at the Conference and not at the conference that it was a “wine bloggers” conference and not a “wine writers” conference. This begs the question, what’s the difference?

So you don’t have to wait until the end of this post, let me proved the answer now: nothing.

If that’s satisfying enough, you can move along. But if you want to know why no wine publicists sees any difference between a wine blogger and a wine writer, stick around a little.

Here’s the bottom line: publicists are in the business of helping their clients tell their story, of finding media outlets that will communicate the uniqueness and their client’s brand and products, of seeking ways to tell a wider audience why their client is worth their time and consideration. We don’t care about the media outlet’s disposition: blogger or writer…it doesn’t matter. What matters is the the size, demographics and interests of their audience.

• A media outlet that serves 1,000,000 readers matters.A media outlet that serves

• 500,000 fifty-year old men with

A media outlet that serves 100,000 fifty year-old, wine drinking men will matter most

(Before we get into a sexism discussion, read who buys wine costing $50 or more)

Some wine bloggers have mused in a disappointed fashion that they and their peers don’t get the same attention as other writers; that the wine industry is missing the boat by not catering to the very enthusiast wine blogger community. The industry and publicists have nothing against wine bloggers. The problem is that very few of them have much of an audience to speak of size wise. It’s true that their audience happens to be very enthusiastic. Still, the publicist, having only so much time, will weigh the ROTI (Return on Time Invested) against the potential result. Do they pitch a writer at a 40,000 circulation daily or do they pitch the wine blogger with a much more wine centric audience of 500 readers per month?

Here’s the point. There is no Old Media. There is no New Media. There is only Media. And some of it offers a better return on the publicists (or winery’s) investment in time).