Mainstream Media

I will be appearing as a panelist in the "HOT TOPIC" panel at Fair Media Council's Connection Day (PDF).

Hot Topic!
Convergence: How Technology Has Changed News
Today, you get your news delivered straight to your cell phone, you listen to podcasts and watch streaming video on your local news radio web site. Find out how all the technological advances that enabled these new news delivery methods impact the types of stories you get in the news, as well as how the inner workings of newsrooms are changing to accommodate your unquenchable thirst for information.
With:

Carl Corry, Executive Producer, News12.com
Ethan Dreilinger, Product Manager, CBS Mobile News
Luke Funk, Sr. Web Producer, myfoxny.com
Liza Sabater, Blogdiva & Publisher, CultureKitchen.com

Fair Media Council is a New York metro area not-for-profit media watch organization that educates and advocates for quality local news coverage.

I don't think I have said it on this blog although it is something I consistently advice to advocacy organizations whenever I am on the conference trail : If you want to put a dent into mainstream media, you need to start investing into your own new media alternatives.

Here's an AP newsbit that Zuzu over at Feministe has blasted to pieces because, as an AP article, they get to set the tone of this act of agression and terror perpetrated against workers and patients of a reproductive health clinic in Texas :
Feministe » The terrorism that dare not speak its name:

For some reason, terrorism doesn’t count if it’s directed against women and their health care providers. It’s just not news, and the fact that it goes unremarked in the national media — and hell, even in the local media, as in the case of the Austin bomb — contributes to the idea that women are not important and that violence directed at women is not only to be expected, but to be dismissed.

[...]

We saw something similar with the Virginia Tech shooting — the campus police initially dismissed the idea that the gunman would be a danger to anyone else — even though they hadn’t identified or caught him at the time — because they saw a dead woman and just assumed that it was a “domestic incident” and there would be no further violence. Clinic bombings are treated as the equivalent of shrugged-off “domestic incidents” — hey, it’s just violence against women. It’s not like it’s going to affect real people or anything.

I couldn't resist writing that title because there is so much left unsaid of the power of social networks.

So Lindsay proudly posted that image, celebrating her sell to Time.com --a photograph they found of Amanda via Flickr. Flickr, by the way, has become a social networking site disguised as photo storage company.

Anyhow, she took that photograph of Amanda while she and I and a whole gaggle of political and entertainment bloggers were in Amsterdam. We were part of the Bloggers in Amsterdam group, paid by Holland.com and sponsored by BlogAds.

Many women in the Feminist Bloggers Network know each other now for more than a couple of years. Women tend to operate social networks and powerlines a bit differently than men, and so our presence in mainstream media has not been as forceful as the handful of male-run blogs the mainstream journos tend to call "The Blogs".

Well, we not be as prominent in the public eye as some of us would like to be, but make no mistake --we're everywhere.

Want proof? MAJeff, the last quote in that Time.com article happens to be a FBN member who's been on a blogging (but not commenting) sabbatical; and used to be a key player in our blog.

Just saying.

Check out my photo of Amanda and me in Amsterdam after the jump ...