TheMommyBlog

Wednesday, August 01, 2007 BlogHer

Women Are Half of All Bloggers - But Media Aren’t Noticing
By Jennifer L. Pozner
The Women’s Media Center

Wednesday 01 August 2007
If you get your news from, well, the news media, you can be forgiven if you didn’t know that nearly 800 women gathered in Chicago last weekend for the third annual convention of BlogHer, an online community of more than 13,000 blogging women diverse in age, ethnicity and political persuasion. According to a search of the Nexis news database, only three Chicago newspapers covered the conference, as if this national assemblage of women writers and videographers were simply a local story. Not one national network or cable news broadcast deigned to mention it.

Compare that to the glut of coverage bestowed on YearlyKos, a conference for left-leaning bloggers made popular by the blustering A-list boys of the “netroots.” In the month leading up to Kos’s gathering this coming weekend, also in Chicago, the conference’s perceived political power has been discussed in print and broadcast outlets from regional newspapers such as the Chattanooga Times Free Press and the Austin American Statesman to major dailies such as the Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle, and debated on MSNBC, ABC, Fox News, PBS and, for the satirically inclined, The Colbert Report on Comedy Central.

Despite Pew research reporting that women are actually 50% of all people who blog, corporate journalists and independent bloggers alike often prefer to fall back on the hand-wringing question, “Where are the women bloggers?” They’d know the answer if they took the time to seek us out as news sources, read our commentaries or cover events such as BlogHer.

If many believe that blogging is a primarily male sport, it is partially because old-school gender disparities in resource allocation, power and popularity long entrenched in traditional news media are replicating themselves online. In the blogosphere, young men - mostly white and mostly economically comfortable - link to, write about, promote and fund their buddies’ blogs; and corporate media play star-makers, quoting, profiling and featuring the punditry of this New Boys Network. As is hardly surprising to those of us who monitor media representations of women, women who blog (especially those who write about feminist issues) are off the radar.

UPDATE: Jennifer, the author of the article, has commented to let me know that she got her number from the Blogher organizers and did her due dilligence. Thank you for correcting me, and please accept my apologies for not doing my own research. I just spent twenty minutes trying to get the answer online, and came to the conclusion that I’d have to ask them myself to get an answer! As usual, I’m pulling stuff out of my… ear, which is why people should get their info from the press and not from an unemployed, frazzled mom of three who doesn’t know where next month’s mortgage is coming from. Honestly, though, I thought there were 700 at the 2006 conference, and it seemed impossible that there weren’t more this year!

Mea culpa. Pax tecum?