Boston Globe, WSJ.com Launch Blogsites for Women

Though reeling on many fronts, some U.S. newspapers are starting to explore whether blogs can offer a way to hold onto audience segments that are fragmenting faster than the polar ice caps.

Several new efforts target specific subgroups of women readers. The Boston Globe has launched a new site, BoMoms, that it hopes will appeal to mothers. Besides the usual calendar features, parenting forums and cute photo galleries, the site currently features six Mom bloggers, one of whom posts her personal journal under the heading of The Reluctant Breeder.

The newspaper’s attempt to reach mothers online, particularly those whose kids are still too young to attend school, is a smart one. The first few years of raising children, typically after interrupting their careers, leave many new mothers feeling isolated and hungry for adult conversation.

The web, of course, can offer an effective option for solving these problems.

Meanwhile, I am impressed by the advertising that already appears on this new site,  as well as the interface design, which encourages women to join (it’s free) in order to participate. The registration process, of course, will allow the Globe to offer qualified leads to advertisers at a premium — which in the case of consumer-oriented Moms, should be substantial.

While this may seem like the basic ABC’s of Web 2.0, it is good to see a large newspaper moving aggressively to secure a key online demographic in this era of falling print circulation, if only because daily newspapers generally have been way too slow joining the party.

Actually, BoMoms is not the first of its kind. The nod for that goes to IndyMoms.com, launched by the Indianapolis Star two years ago.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal Online has announced the launch of a new section, Journal Women, which it describes as “a place where ambitious professional and executive women can come together to read and share ideas on work, family and the intersection of the two.”

A key feature of the new section is a blog called “The Juggle,” which examines the difficulties in balancing work and family life. Today’s entry by lead blogger Sara Schaefer Munoz warns: “Don’t Check that BlackBerry With Kids in the Pool.”

Her post is a serious reminder of the section on parenting in one of my favorite books, Freakonomics, wherein the authors consider the common myth that owning a gun is the greatest risk to your child’s safety. In fact, as they document, if you own both a gun and a swimming pool, the swimming poll is 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is.