Category: Editorial

It Hits the Fan for Mom Bloggers Everywhere – We're looking at you WSJ

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Let’s start with the title. “The Mommy Business Trip” is the headline on Katherine Rosman’s piece in the Wall Street Journal and its tagline is the equally icky “Conferences Appeal to Women With A Guilt-Free, Child-Free Reason to Leave Home.” It gets worse from there. In 1,228 words, Rosman takes a real trend — the explosion of conferences for women with online businesses and a parallel surge in the numbers of advertisers who are courting those entrepreneurs — and turns it into a tale of desperate housewives who use the pretext of work as an excuse to escape from home and act like ninnies. A few questions: Is it possible that the reason a woman attends events like BlogHer and Mom 2.0 is NOT because she needs an excuse to “leave her husband and children,” but rather because those conferences provide her with the connection and know-how to do her job? Would Rosman ever describe Dad 2.0, which attracted hundreds of men who write about parenting, as a gaggle of Daddies “who need a legitimate reason to leave home”? Haven’t men been going to sales meetings and conferences for generations? Staying at lovely hotels and dining in fine restaurants — and sometimes acting really silly? Do you think there is a single article about men and work travel that oozes the same patronizing tone as this one? Find me one. I challenge you. Isn’t there a big ‘ol conference in Austin every spring , where the crowd is mostly male and the schmoozing and partying is considered far more of the draw than the actual sessions? Didn’t Rosman write about that conference two years back, calling South By Southwest a place where “Internet entrepreneurs, engineers, journalists, promoters, moneymen and web-savvy Hollywood types meet to discuss technology, brand and buzz”? […]

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