The New York Times Vs. Mommy Bloggers

Trying to sort through the New York Times vs Mommy Bloggers story? Here’s what happened:

• March 6: Jennifer Mendelsohn, a freelancer for the NYT, attended Bloggy Boot Camp in Baltimore, a one day workshop for mom bloggers to talk through everything from search engine optimization to monetization + dealing with PR pitches.
• March 12: Jennifer tweets that the article is live online and will print in Sunday’s edition of the Styles section. It’s called, “Honey, Don’t Bother Mommy. I’m Too Busy With My Blog and Building My Brand”.
• There are some rumblings, particularly on Twitter, about the article.
• March 13: Liz Gumbiner of Mom-101 writes a response titled, “Honey, Don’t Bother Mommy. I’m Writing a Mildly Annoyed Letter to the New York Times”, which seems to release the floodgate because within hours dozens of posts and hundreds of tweets have rolled out. She also links to Jennifer’s mom blog, who is subsequently flooded with (mostly angry) messages on her blog and her Twitter account.
• March 14: A Facebook Group called Mothers Who blog speaking out against the NY Times is launched in an attempt to aggregate content from upset bloggers.
• March 15: It seems everyone has written about it – including The Huffington Post. The New York Times sends out a memo to its freelancers to remember their ethics guidelines regarding conflicts of interest. {Correction: Jennifer never received the memo – and the cause for it being sent remains unknown}
• March 16: Jennifer writes a rebuttal to her NYT article trying to explain how things got out of hand & her intention + tone was misperceived.
• March 27: Subsequent publications pick up the piece but change the title and graphics which had been major points of contention in most of the angry posts (Jennifer did not choose the title or graphic, which she addressed in her rebuttal). One example is the Mercury News who changed the title to, “Mommy Bloggers Gather To Sharpen Web, Business and Marketing Skills”. This helps simmer bloggers down and put the pitch forks away.

Be sure to check out our list of reactions to the original article