Thursday, February 21, 2008

Girls and the Internet

Today's New York Times has an article about the dominance of young females on the Internet. According to the article, 35% of girls (age 12-17) blog, compared to 20% of boys. And 32% of girls create or work on their own Web pages, compared to 22% of boys. They also greatly outnumber boys in having social networking sites. The article gives examples of girls who create and advise on CSS code creation and who design icons and animated icons. Some of these young women are making money (at least some money, no figures are given) from their sites.

So where was this article placed in the paper? In the business section with other "Internet entrepreneurs"? In the technology section? No, it was in Fashion & Style, right under an article on wedding dresses.

*sigh*

3 comments:

Molly Kleinman said...

You know, I read (and enjoyed) the Times online, but I didn't notice what section the article was in. How obnoxious.

Mary Alice Ball said...

Eew, how irritating! I actually threw out that section along with one other before I got down to reading what I considered to be the "real news." My mistake.

Anonymous said...

I think you'll find that the section in which an item appears is directly related to which dept commissioned it and which journalist wrote it. So if the travel editor had one of his/her staff write a piece on the business practices of airlines it is most unlikely to end up in the Business pages.

Whilst I agree that the placing is unfortunate, I'd suggest that there is a silver lining to this cloud in that it looks like the editor of that section of the paper thought this was a story well worth telling. And that can only be a good thing, I feel.