Where are Public Media’s Female Bloggers?
A few of us got an email from John Proffitt a short while ago:
Guys (and I mean that in a gender-specific way),
I was exchanging e-mail with a public media colleague of the older persuasion and mentioned the names of the various bloggers / thinkers that I follow — and each of you was mentioned — and he asked me, “Where are all the women bloggers? Is this just a guy thing?”
I know there are women out there in pubmedia that are on Twitter, as I follow some of them there, but are there active female bloggers in public media? I don’t know I know of any off-hand (although I’m sure I’m missing some).
So two questions come to mind:
1. Who are some public media female bloggers out there?
2. (assuming #1 is a short list…) Why is it predominantly men blogging about public media?
Good questions. The admittedly lean blogroll of public media bloggers on my site doesn’t include any women (although I have some in my feed reader), and that’s my loss.
I don’t know if there’s a gender-specific way of looking at public media (hey, maybe there is), but I do know that any list of the most influential people in public media includes a lot of women.
So… are you a blogger? Are you in public media? Are you female? You’re reading me – at least at this moment… and I should be reading you. Add your name and URL in the comments. Heck, if you’re male, and you’re in public media, then I should be reading you, too.
Do you blog about social media? plain vanilla public media? fundraising? audience? pubmedia news and gossip? There’s a lot of knowledge floating around that more of us can tap into.
Andy Carvin seeded a massive list of public media twitter folks; maybe we should draft him to come up with a similar list for bloggers. There’s all kinds of knowledge out here that we can tap into.
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As a female reader of the public media blogs and tweets out there, I have also wondered this. I don’t have an answer, and don’t have a blog to contribute. I’ve thought about it, but honestly I don’t think my editors would appreciate that. It would be nice to rant about public media online, but I do that enough in our own newsroom and in the spirit of collaboration, most of it is not for public consumption.
Another question that I’ve also pondered: Why are so many of the public media blogs centered around radio? Where is tv? PBS are you there?
Back in my radio producer days, it always felt harder to get women to agree to come on Odyssey as guests. The leading consensus on our team was that dudes were much more willing to spout off opinions about topics they didn’t really know about. You would rarely hear “That’s not my area of expertise, perhaps you should ask someone else”. Anecdotal, to say the least, but I often think about that in the blogosphere. Authority on the web often comes from the volume and frequency at which you state your views – and not always tied to the value of your ideas. So, here’s my gross gender generalization: maybe women see through all the ego-posturing so common in blogs… and simply don’t want to play that game. But maybe I’m spouting off on something I don’t know that much about. Sigh…
I’m the former director of PBS Interactive and am now an independent consultant who counts PBS and NPR among my clients; one of my current projects is project-managing the CPB-funded election collaboration. While my focus as a consultant isn’t exclusively on pubilc media, most of my clients are either non-profits or media companies (or both!). And I’m a blogger – a DOUBLE blogger, in fact
My professional blog is http://www.amandahirsch.com/blog and my other, “just because I love it” blog is Creative DC: http://www.creativedc.org. Thanks for asking! (I’m also on Twitter as @creativedc)
Another thought: it may just be that a few men happened to start their blogs about public media, and filled that niche, and then women who may have otherwise thought about doing it saw that the need was being filled.