Hearst Launches First Blog Council for Redbook Magazine


Redbook magazine is adding a blog council of five mom bloggers to its site Wednesday, the first of several blogger collectives parent company Hearst Corporation is bringing to the websites of its magazines.

The Motherboard blog council, which has its own designated area on redbookmag.com, is made up of five contributors across both coasts: Tracey Black, Alicia Harper, Amy Shearn, Joslyn Gray and Carmen Stacier. Each is an established, highly opinionated blogger in her own right, and will submit original content to Redbook in exchange for promotion of her own blog and the search value attached to that in additio! n to, of course, the benefit that comes with being associated with the Redbook brand, says Mark Weinberg, VP of programming and product strategy at Hearst. The five contributors will also be promoting the Motherboard blog council on their own blogs.

For Jill Herzig, editor-in-chief of Redbook, the council presents an opportunity to expand Redbooks parenting coverage, and to bring several independent voices to the site. Redbook has the highest percentage of women with young children in the household of any magazine, she says. Still, the magazine can only do so much parenting content given that our readers are in every age stage of their lives. The magazine [also] needs to speak in one consistent voice. Online youre kind of free from that.

Redbook isnt the first magazine to add blogger contributions to its site. A handful of other magazines, including Conde Nasts Lucky and Glamour, have launched blog networks dubbed Lucky Style Collective and Young and Posh, respectively. What Ive found is that the content on these networks, which are syndicated directly from the blogs of their dozens of contributors, can vary widely in quality both of the writing and especially of the photography as well as in approach and aesthetic. In other words, the content on those pages lacks the same polish the rest of their websites carry.

The challenge for Redbook, therefore, is to keep the quality of its new, more free-form contributions on par with the rest of its content. Jennifer Barrett, who oversees daily programming for cosmopolitan.com, redbookmag.com, and goodhousekeeping.com, notes that Redbook was careful to choose bloggers that were neither sloppy thinkers nor writers. Herzig added that the bloggers would! be subj ect to the same editing and fact-checking processes as the rest of redbookmag.coms staff, while still aiming to preserve their independent voices.

Redbook is planning to grow the number of contributors to Motherboard over time. Blog councils are also in the works for other Hearst titles, Weinberg says.

More About: hearst, mommy bloggers, redbook

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