Enter World: exploring mediated cultures

Saturday, July 22, 2006

Women Blog.

Back in March of 2005 I wrote about the mass media’s emphasis on male bloggers in Who’s afraid of the white male blogger?. Today I ran across a Pew study that backs up my assumptions that the blogospehere is not male dominated.

This excerpt from WIMN’s Voices sums it up rather well:

Listen up, corporate journos: time to stop reporting on all those “here’s a photo of me on a picnic with my pet fluffy and a Photoshopped Lindsey Lohan” stories about bloggers. There’s a more socially relevant story to be told. A small but growing (blog readership and blog ownership have increased dramatically in recent years, Pew shows) army of young, racially diverse, fact-checking bloggers - half of whom are women, and a nearly a third of whom are politically motivated - are engaging the public debate every day.

This Pew study doesn’t only shed light on the demographics of the blogosphere - it raises some very basic questions about the demographics of sources quoted in corporate news reports about blogs. If bloggers are approximately 50% female and are racially diverse, why are white men still the majority of bloggers quoted and discussed in print and broadcast reports about blogs (that is, reports not focused on porn, or on predatory threats to girls with MySpace accounts)?