Location! Location! Location!
Sometimes, stories about blogging and bloggers make the New York Times’ front-page. A-1. Juxtaposed with the critical stories of the day. Other times, they can be found among articles about brides Botoxing their bridesmaids and advice on “awkward social situations.” In the F section.
Such was the case for the Times’ coverage of the annual BlogHer conference, for which a thousand mostly female bloggers gathered recently in San Francisco. “Blogging’s Glass Ceiling,” was the headline. Sunday Styles was the section.
Erin Kotecki Vest, BlogHer’s Political Director, blasts the Times for the way it handled the story:
Perhaps, with all the talk of us being “…a corporate-sponsored Oprah-inflected version of a ’60s consciousness-raising group” [the Times] missed the part about 36 million of us taking over as power-users of the web while raising our children and supporting our families.
UPDATE: After reading his Styles section Sunday, Greg Pollowitz wrote on National Review’s Media Blog:
Oh, and one question for the uber-liberal, p.c. NY Times. Why are you covering a story on female citizen journalists in the “Fashion & Style” section? Sexism, thy name is Grey Lady.
UPDATE II: I am reminded of this:
An article about women in science and engineering from the New York Times, “Diversity Isn’t Rocket Science, Is It?” seems like it ought to go in the news or business section. It ran in fashion and style instead. Why? Because white lab coats and Tyvek cleanroom jumpsuits are totes the hot look this summer!
I'd assume that the NYT coverage was sexist if I hadn't been a BlogHer presenter two years ago. The conference is a cheesy marketing juggernaut.
The conference was a fun get-away/socializing/networking opportunity for mothers.
The year I was there, BlogHer was about pitching pink products to upper middle class women with children. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but the end product deserved to be featured in Fashion and Style.
The program content was geared to the lowest common denominator. The participants were not assumed to be politically or technologically sophisticated. This wasn't primarily a gathering of movers and shakers in business, politics or activism. It was a social gathering of casual blog users. Which is great, but not a hard news story.
The whole conference had the look and feel of a lite yogurt commercial.
Posted by Lindsay Beyerstein on Tue 29 Jul 2008 at 12:11 PM
Interesting perspective, Lindsay, thanks.
"Blogging's Glass Ceiling," to me, seems an interesting topic for exploration; maybe this event (any single event, I'd imagine) wasn't the best vehicle for that. Maybe such an exploration wasn't actually what the Times was after, headline aside.
Posted by Liz Cox Barrett on Tue 29 Jul 2008 at 01:37 PM