By Guest Blogger Anna Clark
First, the bad news.
The sold-out " Beyond Broadcast: From Participatory Culture to Participatory Democracy " conference, held last weekend at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology, offered up a slate of presenters that in no way accurately reflected the diversity of conference participants.
Here’s the breakdown:
The morning featured 10 presenters on […]

By Guest Blogger Sandi Burtseva
I got hooked on Keith Olbermann after coming upon a clip of his in October 2005. He was using Michael Chertoff’s slip of the tongue Chertoff had called Louisiana a city as a jumping-off point for a magnificently righteous tirade about the Bush administration’s mishandling of Katrina. “…The current administration,” […]

By GUEST BLOGGER Sarah Werthan Buttenwieser
Have the soccer moms of yesteryear morphed into the mad moms of today? A couple of articles—“Mom’s Mad. And She’s Organized”—in the New York Times’ Style section and “Moms rise up, fight for workplace rights” at CNN.com suggest the answer is yes.
Both articles profile the organization MomsRising and […]

Breaking Into Political Journalism
By Guest Blogger Kay Steiger
It’s no secret that the field of political reporting is overwhelmingly male. Just scan through the bylines of your favorite political magazine. But getting experience at a political magazine is the first step. The American Prospect is looking for editorial interns for our Summer 2007 session. Just send […]

ote the perfect circle of self-referrals or referrals to People Just Like Me. Note also how odd it is that an intelligent and experienced editor would give such an extremely weak excuse for the dearth of women among the reviewers. I wonder if anyone asked what percentage of the books to be reviewed are on military history and why this percentage (probably not an enormous one) dictated the gender of the reviewers so totally, or if anyone asked what evidence Gewen has to assume that women don’t write on military history. Could women at least review cook books, then? Please, pretty please?

A 39-year old celebrity mysteriously dies. She was the high-profile spokesperson for a diet pill that she claimed made her lose 70 pounds in a very short time. The media covers the aftermath of the death day and night but doesn’t ask one major question:
What was in those diet pills?
And, in the nonstop […]

By Guest Blogger Ann Friedman

Check out this disturbing Indian commercial for Fair & Lovely skin whitener (made by Unilever, which also manufactures Dove’s “real beauty” products… and Axe). Here’s a synopsis:

One TV commercial aired in India (often referred to as the Air Hostess advertisement) “showed a young, dark-skinned girl’s father lamenting he had no […]

By Guest Blogger Amanda Marcotte
You know you’re doing something right when the right wing noise machine
paints a target on your back. Having spent two weeks getting harassed
and hounded by right wing nuts intent on separating me from my job with
the John Edwards campaign, returning to this thought — that I must be
doing something right […]

By Guest Blogger Tedra Osell
More and more, what happens online, in the world of blogs, spills over into newspapers and National Public Radio: the “mainstream media,” as traditional news sources have come to be known. Example: the recent blog dustup over John Edward’s hiring–then firing, then rehiring, then accepting the resignations of–two women to […]

It’s too hard for journalists to give up on the description of what Nancy Pelosi wears and whether she looks her age or not or if Hillary Clinton’s haircut suits her (and what deep truths it might tell us about her true womanliness or lack of the same). But there is a second avenue […]