Press Action ::: Women and News Blogs

Tuesday, January 14, 2003

Women and News Blogs

Where are the news-and-views websites run by women?

Politically active women operate their own websites but few of them manage a site or blog that is updated on a regular basis with news and views about the world around us. I’m not talking about the men or women bloggers who operate their sites as a personal diary. What I’m looking for is women-run websites similar to Kurt Nimmo’s Another Day in the Empire or Brian Salter’s Questions Questions or Cockburn and St. Clair’s CounterPunch or AndrewSullivan.com or LewRockwell.com.

Lucianne Goldberg and Virginia Postrel are the notable exceptions to the rule of male-run news and view websites.

Why do men dominate the news and views websites? I asked my wife, the tech savvy one in the family, and she explained that perhaps women prefer face-to-face discourse while men like the anonymity of the web when giving their two cents on a topic. Women certainly are as opinionated as men, but they may thrive on the back-and-forth discourse afforded in verbal communication. And perhaps women are more action-oriented and believe in working for change rather than publishing their opinions on certain topics, as if anybody really cared.

Lisa Guernsey wrote a piece in the New York Times in November in which she examined the issue of the male-dominated personal website world. “The allure of blogging lies in the thrill of circumventing the establishment, of being able to publish worldwide without having to be an op-ed columnist or a famous writer,” Guernsey writes.

Postrel told Guernsey that blogging is actually quite friendly to women. “You don’t have to be part of quite literally an old boys network,” Postrel said.

Here are the women-run news-and-views websites mentioned in Guernsey’s NY Times article: