E-Media Tidbits

nytimes.com NYT's feature on the BlogHer conference led its Fashion & Style section on Sunday.

...Well, front page of the Fashion & Style section, that is. (UPDATE JULY 31: How the BlogHer story wound up in NYT Styles.)

Several bloggers complained that the Times article by Kara Jesella focused too heavily on stereotypically "girly" stuff -- from its lead ("For two days last week, many of the men's bathrooms at the Westin St. Francis Hotel here were turned into women's bathrooms."), to its details ("There was a lactation room, child care, and onesies for sale emblazoned with the words 'my mom is blogging this.'"), to its dismissive jabs ("It has since evolved into a corporate-sponsored Oprah-inflected version of a '60s consciousness-raising group.")

I noticed these flaws when I first read it. Nevertheless, I still said the story was "pretty good." By that, I meant (and should have clarified at the time) "better than I expected from the Times, whose leaders reflexively slam bloggers as barbarians at the gate. Baby steps."

Here are the good points as I see them: At least Jesella's story recognized the diversity and influence of female bloggers. Also, even though the Times did ghettoize this article by running it in Fashion & Styles, at least they didn't bury it. It was, after all, a front-page story in that section, on a Sunday. Thus it was far more visible to the Times' largest print audience than if it had run on a back page of section A, especially on a weekday. Tradeoffs.

Today, Rebecca Traister wrote in Salon.com's Broadsheet section: "The problem is not simply with the placement of one story, but with a newspaper that does not take 'women's stories' -- in this case one that could have also been about business, technology, politics or gender as a social, economic or professional impediment to success -- seriously enough to give them other, more newsy space in its pages."

Traister continued, "The tone of Jesella's story -- with its light descriptions of 'flurries of discussion,' its tossed-off reference to sponsorship by General Motors and KY Jelly (har!) and casual reportage about the 'tears' and 'hooting' at some of the more 'emotional' panels -- was certainly constructed on the diminutive model of newspaper conference coverage. No one wrote about the guys at [the concurrent political blogger conference] Netroots standing around urinals, or, for that matter, the women at Netroots applying their makeup, though they surely did that in Austin, too. And that's without question because Netroots was not a gender-specific gathering, and therefore didn't get automatic feminized journalistic treatment..."

Traister went on to critique how some blogs by women, such as Lemonade Life (which is about living with diabetes) are named:

"...The fact is that the people over at Netroots are calling their blogs things like the Plank and the Page and First Read and Hotline, names that scream solidity and self-importance and power. A blog about personal experience and illness certainly needn't be named with an eye to political urgency, but what about starting from a place of self-regard and personal authority and naming it after yourself, like Kos, or Drudge, or one of the women who does get taken seriously online, Arianna Huffington? Think about how much easier it would be to get the respect that some of the BlogHer women crave if they started taking themselves more seriously...

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Traister's wrapup included this question:

"'Feminine' climes are where female writing voices are not simply heard but also remunerated and celebrated. Why shouldn't writers pursue the success where they're encouraged, rather than banging their heads until they bleed against the door that continues to bar them from mainstream, and therefore still male, modes of discourse about things like politics, technology, the economy, business or science?"

This post raised points well worth considering. But for me, the comments to Traister's post cut more to the heart of the matter.

For example, Badstoat commented: "Why are politics, technology, the economy, business, and science the 'mainstream' in the first place? Why do we consider the body, illness, the personal, the emotional, and anything pertaining to the realm of home (like motherhood) to be on the margins of society? ...Some of the best political writing I see is on personal blogs, and it's intertwined with personal writing. Because their blogs hybridize the personal and the political (which is how most people actually experience the two), they don't get the attention and respect a blog traditionally in the 'male' realm of 'politics' gets from mainstream media."

And Salon co-founder Scott Rosenberg commented: "I think the most important thing that the BlogHer bloggers -- or any other group that is busy defining itself and presenting its own face to the world via its own media creations -- can do in regard to the Times is stop worrying about what it says. Newspapers are suffering a slow eclipse with all its attendant pains. Bloggers are better off doing their own thing than obsessing over the Times' coverage."

What are your thoughts? Please comment below.

(Thanks to Catherine Dold for the tip on the Salon post.)