Marianna,

Rather than potentially boring any readers that remain here reading this letters section, if you would like to continue this conversation, please feel free to email me at dougom@yahoo.com.

Thanks.

Douglas,

Are you objecting to Helen Thomas being shunted off to a side pocket of Salon, or are you objecting to Broadsheet's offending of your sensibilities by forcing you to come here and actually read content that would ordinarily only be read by women? God forbid! In any case, it seems to have worked, and, despite the occasional idiot male troll, I hope they continue this strategy. You might be forced, at some point, to see something from our perspective.

You see, this is how it begins. It's always a bit of a risk. A blogger departs the safe confines of the predominantly male mainstream for what appears to be a candy-striped female ghetto. People complain. Sometimes the venture does fail because the substance is unable to overcome the ghetto, but that's a risk a feminist blogger has to take. At some point, thinking male readers such as yourself will begin, as I already do, to filter out the Dita von Teese postings as occasional idiosyncracies and see that our concerns really are yours as well. Just wait and see.

I began to believe that Broadsheet would succeed as soon as I saw all the vindictive male whining in the comments and realized that it had indeed struck a nerve, and I do believe that it is getting better by the day.

Marianna,

At the risk of appearing pedantic, let me repeat myself: what I object to is the fact that a story about a member of the White House press corps taking Scott McClellan to task was shunted off into a side pocket of Salon for the sole reason that the reporter in question is a woman. That's absurd. And honestly, if someone told Helen Thomas that her smackdown of McClellan got put in a "woman's blog" on a web site that puts Joe Conason and Sydney Blumenthal up front, do you think she'd be pleased? Or think it was a step backwards for women?

So it's not a question of wading through the fluff, as it were; it's a question of, why is this stuff being put off to the side? Why was this story put there? Just because it was Helen Thomas asking the questions, rather than Anderson Cooper? If it was Cooper, would it have been in War Room rather than Broadsheet? And if the answer to that is "Yes," then isn't that a bit of regression when women want to be taken seriously in what was traditionally a man's industry? And do we really want to move Salon to a place where it's *more* like GQ, rather than less? That doesn't seem like a forward step to me.

(Playboy has interviews and articles? Who knew?)

Douglas,

Oddly, no one complains about this sort of thing when serious interviews appear in magazines like GQ and Playboy, as they have for years and years. I'd prefer not to have to flip through pages of naked or scantily clad women and obnoxious liquor and car ads in order to read an interview with Jimmy Carter or Hunter S. Thompson. Men's traditional side interests (naked women, cars, sports, cigars, whatever) have always been considered normal and mainstream, and we've been dealing with seeing those things juxtaposed with issues that matter to both women and men for decades.

So if I can deal with scantily clad bimbos in the pages of men's magazines, you can deal with a little fluff now and then, no?

Marianna,

What I object to is, why was this story in a "woman's" section? Why isn't it on the main page, or in War Room? Why doesn't someone on Salon do another full story on the supine press corps and how they finally had a few sparks one day? Or mention that, after Helen Thomas upbraided him, Scott McClellan immediately went to one of his "out" reporters--the reporter from India, who can always be counted on to ask a question that is innocuous from a domestic political standpoint--now that "Jeff Gannon" is gone?

The point here is, why are these stories relegated to a side blog "for women," when a lot of them apply to everyone, or could be of interest to more than "just women?" How are these stories chosen? Why on earth (for example) was the story about Rosa Parks in Broadsheet? Didn't she have impact way beyond "just" women? Why was *this* story in Broadsheet? Just because Helen Thomas is a woman? That seems completely absurd to me.

So yes, I object strenuously to ploughing through a lot of fluff in the "women's" section on the off chance that there's a story like this there. And I also object to "women's stories" (whatever the hell *they* are!) being shunted off to the side.

Hopefully that makes a little more sense.

You guys deride Broadsheet because of all the pink, light, fluffy content. But when posts on women of substance shows up here, you complain because it's in a section that's usually full of light, fluffy content?

My head hurts.

If it's on Crooks and Liars, you know it's getting lots of play all over the blogosphere. Salon's not the only vector for this kind of stuff, you know.

I agree with Douglas Moran.

As for the Helen Thomas story eventually finding it's way to a front page story, I wouldn't hold my breath on that one. Since Broadsheet was introduced, there was only item item that appeared in both Broadsheet and another section of Salon.

I don't like Broadsheet. I don't like the "women" slant, I don't like the pink, I don't like the illustration, and I don't like the tone. Having said all that, I will tell you that I do skim through the topics everyday just so I don't miss the every-so-often important (to me) items that won't appear anywhere else in Salon.

At least we still have one decent reporter covering the White House, in amongst all the TV prima donnas (and dons), Milquetoasts, etc. Go, Helen, go!