List of top 30 Feminist blogs, according to linkfluence

I (unfortunately) wasn’t at the Fem 2.0 conference, but I saw a recent post about the happenings over there. A really interesting group called Linkfluence (they visually mapped the sphere of influence of progressive and conservative blogs during the election) presented on the their visual map of the feminist web and made a list of the top 30 feminist blogs (according to their methodology).

Here’s background, the list and a password to see the map. And Sarah Granger over at Personal Democracy Forum gives us more background on why a map like this is useful and what it tells us.

When the data is compared with the political web, mashed up with it, it’s apparent how embedded within the progressive blogosphere the feminist web is, although it is definitely its own community as well, and how it’s more centrist than fringe on the map. Part of the discussion at Fem 2.0 was about how to reach out and get more traction on issues on other sites not necessarily considered “feminist” by their statistics, and the data shows that these sites dedicated to the discussion for and by women are not operating in an echo chamber.

Once you get to the map, you should click on the different dots (they represent individual blogs. The colored lines represent how the different sites are connecting to each other.
Red lines = who’s linking into that site.
Yellow lines = who that site is linking to
Green lines = mutual links

Check it out. It’s extremely interesting. Any blogs you’re surprised to see? What blogs are you surprised NOT to see?

Here are two different type of video news pieces to get your morning started off on an introspective foot. Now what I want you to think about is not just the news being conveyed, but how its being conveyed. The medium, the tone, the look, the breadth of information packed in a short time period…

MobLogic.tv is one of my favorite online news destinations. Each episode is less than 10 minutes (I can watch in one sitting), it’s fun, funky and snarky without trying too hard, it’s high quality video coupled with great news and analysis and the host Lindsay Campbell is smart, funny and easy to relate to (she’s cool like me!).
Funny and smart without saying a word…
Oh hell, let’s throw another one in so you can see her combo of personality and news reporting. I might have a girl news crush–but can you blame me?
Via, Jack and Jill, I found This Week in Blackness, a video site combining race reporting and analysis with a high dose of black (pun sorta intended) humor. There are some versions that are not safe for work, but check this one out.

And one more for the road… This video touches on the subject of the Obama Waffles reported on both by the American News Project and also reported on The Media Consortium’s own Adele Stan.

What do you think of these two different media products? Is there any progressive media doing anything remotely similar to this?

a short monthly column on media and politics that Tracy and I coauthored for In These Times:

The Best of the Ethnic Media

Forget about the Pulitzer Prize. On Nov. 14, the most recent addition to the world of journalism awards ignored old standards like the New York Times and the Washington Post, instead honoring the work of such reporters as Dennis Romero of Tu Ciudad in Los Angeles and Ray Hanania of Ynet-News.com/Yedioth Ahronoth in Orland Park, Ill.

Romero and Hanania are two of the 19 winners from New America Media’s (NAM) first National Ethnic Media Awards. NAM is the country’s first and largest national network of ethnic news organizations and runs its own newswire service, funneling content to and from its 700 media partners. According to NAM, there are more than 2,500 ethnic media outlets across the country, from newspapers to TV broadcasts.

The NAM award winners reflected the diversity of these media outlets, honoring reporters who work for print publications like the Nguoi Viet Daily News and Little India and broadcast outlets like New Tang Dynasty TV.

“Hurricane Katrina and immigration rights dominated news in ethnic media over the last year,” says awards coordinator Sandip Roy. “Each of these complex stories reflects ethnic media’s unique role as an advocacy voice, as well as a vital source of news and information for their audiences.”

Joining the awards ceremony was Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.). The cynical might suspect that it was more than the great reporting that brought the Senator to the event.

As the Nov. 4 Washington Post reported, “While general-market newspapers and broadcast networks are profitable, their well-heeled audience is steadily shrinking. These ethnic media– whose readers, viewers and listeners are often recent immigrants of lower income and limited interest to advertisers– say their current worth may be small but their potential is immense.”

And NAM knows it. The next day, the organization held its first national professional development seminar, including a training session on “The Future of the Ethnic Vote in American Politics.”

a short monthly column on media and politics that Tracy and I coauthored for In These Times:

The Two Faces of Keith Olbermann

“The leading terrorist group in this world right now is al-Qaeda,” says MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, “but the leading terrorist group in this country right now is the Republican Party.”

Olbermann is on a roll, delivering a series of “Special Comments” that have hoisted ratings for his cable news show “Countdown” by nearly 70 percent since late August. The cable news host has certainly raised the stakes with these commentaries, which break sharply from the quick-change routines of typical cable news. No tickers or blinking graphics distract viewers from Olbermann’s impassioned and hard-hitting anti-Bush regime diatribes, delivered head-on into the camera.

Viewers are hooked: tens of thousands have watched the commentaries on YouTube. An October 8 LA Times article notes that “Olbermann has become a hero to Bush opponents.” And yet a number of female commentators aren’t as enamored of the self-aggrandizing host. Take his reporting on a recent celebrity dust-up; the tagline for the segment: “A Slut and Battery.”

“Keith Olbermann stays classy by reporting that Paris Hilton has ‘had worse things happen to her face’ than being punched,” blogs Jessica Valenti of Feministing. com on October 11. “And you know exactly what he means.”

Rebecca Traister, a columnist for Salon.com’s “Broadsheet,” put it this way via e-mail: “I don’t like Paris Hilton any more than the next sentient human, but Olbermann’s segment on her was depressing, mostly because it demonstrated that trashing women for being sexual is still OK no matter what your professional or journalistic sensibilities are supposed to be. It was low, it was offensive, and it was pathetic.”

This latest gaffe piles on to a mountain of other insulting references the host has made to women. He seems to have it in for blondes in particular, calling colleague Rita Cosby “dumber than a suitcase of rocks,” and smashing an Ann Coulter doll to pieces on air.

Now, we are not making the argument that Ann Coulter is a decent human being. But Olbermann, given the high standards you’re setting for others, we expect more from you.

a short monthly column on media and politics that Tracy and I coauthored for In These Times:

What She Said

This month, we invited Jennifer L. Pozner, executive director of Women In Media & News, to tell us about the organization’s new project: WIMN’s Voices: A Group Blog on Women, Media, AND….

The next time some pundit blames the underrepresentation of women writers in corporate and independent media on a supposed lack of available talent, check out the dynamic and insightful writing at WIMN’s Voices.

WIMN’s Voices creates critical space for media monitoring and analysis by, for and about women. Through this diverse online community, dozens of leading women journalists, media critics, scholars and activists (including In These Times Senior Editors Lakshmi Chaudhry and Silja J.A. Talvi) analyze coverage of women in relation to specific news beats. From war to health, race to humor, international politics to pop culture and beyond, the blog illustrates that all issues can be reported as women’s issues.

In the blog’s first month, WIMN’s Voices writers were invited to discuss their posts in outlets as varied as ABC News Now, WomenseNews.org and Clamor. Here’s a taste of a few recent entries:

• Andi Zeisler on Newsweek’s mea-culpa to single women: To celebrate the 20th anniversary of telling unmarried women over 30 (that they were) less likely to marry than to die at the hands of terrorists by 40 …“Marriage by the Numbers” revisits several of Newsweek’s original subjects [from 1986] and finds–whaddya know?– that eight out of 11 (of the original 14) future cat ladies are in fact happily married after all …
• Sonali Kolhatkar on media coverage of Afghanistan: Mainstream and right-wing commentators expressed horror at the barbarism of a country we supposedly “liberated” (after an Afghan man faced the death penalty for converting to Christianity) … Meanwhile, the institutionalized misogyny of Afghanistan’s judiciary has escaped the notice of the media …
• Makani Themba Nixon on gender and race in the latest X-Men film:
  The comic book Storm’s cold blooded, self assured fearlessness conjures up more of a Grace Jones than the cowering, wimpy character [Halle] Berry brings to the screen … Storm’s character was a bright spot in the relentless denigration of Black women in media … The movie series has stripped Storm of her power and the storyline of all its potency …