BlogHer Closing Keynote

5:30 p.m. - 6:30 p.m.: Closing Keynote - Creating Your Platform: Chris Nolan leads a discussion with four powerhouse women: Hurricane Katrina Direct Relief founder and professional blogger Grace Davis, Huffington Post founder and author Arianna Huffington, WashingtonPost.com/Newsweek Interactive CEO and Publisher Caroline Little and SixApart founder and President Mena Trott. These women have used the web to create and control their agenda...and give a voice to others. Whether your agenda is transforming your life, your business or the world, this closing session should send you back to your lives (or on to the cocktail party) inspired, energized and ready to make things happen!

Chris: How had blogging changed your life? I thought that since many of you are new to this blogging stuff –thought we’d step away from technology and talk about how their lives have changed since before blogging.

Nolan has been a journalist for 20 years. This is not a conversation that she could have dreamed of having when she started covering politics. How things have changed for women…

Starting with Carolyn – was a lawyer and is now CEO of an entity that probably didn’t exist when she got out of law school. What has changed for you and what is going to change in the future?

Carolyn: I did start a day care center after law school, and I was a junior associate who had been in the office for 30 days. We started a day care center. Started online 10 years ago first as a lawyer and then on the business side, and there weren’t a lot of rules, which was great for her. She looks at this room full of women and sees that this is how it’s changing – never saw this before. It’s wonderful.

Grace: Bay area native, 51 years of changing, that’s a long time. I was born and raised in Fremont California and grew up there before Silicon Valley; it was tract homes and apricot orchards. And I was the writer of the family. “And woe to the family who has a writer.” I went into something other than using my English lit degree which translated to my parents as driving a cab, so I went into biotech. Then in the mid to late 90’s, I was entranced by the Internet and was working for a tech firm that was failing. And discovered web journals and was entranced – and that was what the Internet was all about.

Although I had a scientific background, I was computerphobic and if it wasn’t for Mena Trott and Typepad, I wouldn’t have done it – I have fear of server.  What that did for me is that I can write now online and I’m really grateful to mena because technology I really think is for folks and I’m fond of all the geeks and techs out there, but we need to talk and I think that Mena really listened and because of that I’ve been able to write for a living and I’m really grateful for that.

Mena is asked how she sees things changing (she’s younger than the others): I actually see it based upon whether it’s making things easier. Typepad was meant to bring everyone to blogging, but it’s still not easy enough for everyone. Not everyone wants to sit down and spend time writing. The goal for us is to get everyone blogging – they don’t have to be blogging on our platforms, but we want everyone doing it because we’ve seen how it creates communication.

I had a post about a banjo, we didn’t have any money, husband said we couldn’t buy a banjo. I wrote a post calling him out for being the tyrant of the house. Ben is probably the sweetest person at least in his outward persona, and as soon as I put this post up, I got all these emails, asking him how much he spends on beer per year? The second thing people said is why don’t you open your own bank account? The third thing is, why don’t you leave him? And the fact that I had all these people criticizing me, criticizing my marriage, I realized – sometimes blogging isn’t fun.

Over the past couple of years, I realized I don’t really want thousands of people reading my blog – I want ten people who know me really well to read my blog. So I’m giving my only plug, for Vox for the rest of the people who aren’t yet blogging.

Arianna: how to make things that aren’t fun an enjoyable experience?

The political was when Trent Lott was taken on by bloggers and within a few weeks was discredited and had to resign his position and we had to thank the bloggers. And I thought this is awesome – I want to know these people because they’re my heroes. I was so tired of the mainstream media giving a pass to these people.

At the same time, the big love of my life – I had an intellectual crush on him – we had been together for seven years, he did not want to marry me and did not want to have children. So at the age of 30 I made the decision to leave London and move to new york. At about the same time that Trent Lott lost the majority leadership, this man died. We had stayed friends and the minute I heard the news I sobbed and cried and wrote something that was very raw and from my heart and which I thought I would never publish. The next day I got a call from the Times of London and asked me to write something and I did something I had never done – I sent the raw piece, which was unpolished writing.

I was overwhelmed by the response and I realized that people so wanted something authentic and raw because we are so filled with sound bites and preprogrammed and I thought this was amazing – I want to do more of that. And that’s how I decided to become a blogger.

Where do I see it going? I think the sky is the limit. I think this is the most powerful medium since Thomas Payne and the way we women can be the leaders we were meant to be – we need to find the leader in the mirror and act on our leadership skills fearlessly – and it’s the power of blogging.

Carolyn is asked about the power of the blogging medium and writing on the web. Is this a challenge for traditional media companies and businesses?

Carolyn: Yes it is a challenge and either you don’t get there or you get on the boat and we have to get on the boat and we try to report the news and we don’t do it perfectly and there’s a ton of bloggers who will tell us so. Obviously, everyone is covering the terrible situation in Lebanon and Israel and we have a blog with experts weighing in on the situation and readers can comment – and I told my people that we need people who are in Gaza and Golan Heights and tell us what it’s like? What does it feel like to be there? And we did that. Now, we have to be sure to label opinions opinions and reports and have both conservative and liberal bloggers.

Chris: does this medium get more personal or more professional?

Grace: I think it definitely gets both becaue of the license and the incredible freedom we have in using this freedom. In my personal blog, I mix motherhood and advocacy for reproductive rights and then my work for Hurricane Katrina. I think we can be both personal and professional.

Chris: Does it make you nervous to put so much personal information online?

Grace: I think that with this medium it seems to me that an authentic voice is yourself and to identify yourself as who you are. I understand the fears – I’m a mom, my daughter is on MySpace and I understand the fears about MySpace. My blog is extremely personal. People have responded in an amazing way, when I posted about my childhood I received an avalanche of comments.

The Katrina blog came about as a complete accident – we were both accidental relief workers and it did just fall into my life. Katrina was just so overwhelming and the government response was appalling, which pretty much took care of September for me. It was also the month when my daughter started high school.

Chris: What was the worst piece of advice you ever got (not allowed to give the gender of the person who gave it to you)?

Arianna: Most recently, don’t start the Huffington-Post on the grounds of you don’t need to take that risk. And I want to say that on the day we launched we started to get these political reviews and I started to say they were right. I remember Nikki Finke’s review in the LA Weekly. But very simply, it said this is the greatest failure since "Heaven’s Gate," "Gigli," the Madonna of the political world has reinvented herself one time too many. Now she’s blogging… that is simply something that – I think women have a harder time with criticism, we take it personally, how are we going to survive that. You know, we can survive anything if we don’t internalize the criticism because it’s only when we internalize it thast it takes us down.

Carolyn: I was getting all sorts of pressure to hire somebody from print who was very safe and had a lot of credibility in journalism and wasn’t going to cause me any problems. And I didn’t. And I don’t regret it.

I saw Arianna at a panel and I never met you before and I was sitting in the audience and there was some criticism and I was watching you very carefully and there was not one shred of defensiveness and I realized how powerful that was. And that was my big takeaway from that. You practice what you preach.

Chris: Nikki Finke just wrote a column retracting what she said.

Arianna: She said she was wrong.

Mena: I was a chatty kid in school. The advice was, my parents were told Mena needs to focus on herself and not on what the other kids are doing and she needs to stop talking. But like it or not, I am who I am today because I didn’t listen to them and my parents didn’t listen to them. And we were on the cover of Fortune – and my dad emailed the principal of that school to show them. “You always told Mena she wasn’t going to amount to anything.”

Audience: I’d really like to hear more from you about fearlessness. It should apply to all of our identities in a similar way – if I can be fearless as a writer or professional woman, I can be fearless as a mother. But I find motherhood – I’m not remotely fearless. I’m fearful all the time.

Arianna: I completely share your fearfulness in parenting. When I talk about fearlessness, I am talking about not letting our fear stop us. I don’t think we ever get rid of fear, it’s in our DNA. But the trick is not letting it stop us. The hardest fear to overcome is the fear of being a mother. Your fear that your child doesn’t think you’re being a good mother – I can handle Nikki Finke, but if my child doesn’t think – that’s devastating. That’s why I think that there are so many amazing women blogging about mothering – that’s why it’s so powerful. Everything I wrote about my children in my new book I had to have it edited, because I didn’t want them to read or hear anything other than what I was intending.

Talked about meeting Mena and how they met when she wanted to do the website in Movable Type and couldn’t believe her age.

Mena: I won’t always be young.

Grace: That feeds into have I ever received bad advice, because I’m a mom. Fearlessness and being a mom – it takes a great deal of courage to parent – especially to parent a daughter – I think there is so much that works against us, as we know here at BlogHer, we’re here together because many of our professional conclaves are very difficult to women. And all of a sudden I have this Rodgers & Hammerstein song going in my head – make believe you’re brave.

Carolyn: My own mother is very ill but I had the gift of spending some very wonderful time with her. And we were talking about her death – and I told her I was really feeling at peace with our relationship. And she said I know we didn’t get along that well at one point. But you know what, I was just so fearful. And it was just so interesting to hear her say that, but as a kid I heard that as you have no faith in me. So with my children, you have to hold that faith that they will pull through because if you have too much fear for them they won’t grow up with the confidence they need to pull through. And it thought that was very interesting.

Chris: What Carolyn said resonates with the audience and is similar to something in Arianna’s new book

Arianna: Anorexia has become something of an epidemic with teen girls. My mother died in 2000 and she was fearless and she believed – and would give her children whatever it took to give them what she thought they needed. The important thing about mothering, giving our children the sense of unconditional loving, even if they may fail. And having failed many times in my life I realize it doesn’t matter at all.

Audience: I started graduate school late, started a business late. Did it because of fear. Asked panel to share an experience about something they didn’t do because of fear.

Mena: We started Six Apart – just turned 24. And my fear – so wasn’t afraid about the company. We lost our jobs because the company we worked for closed and we had some savings. I think because we started so young, we didn’t realize how much things could fall apart. It’s why teenagers think they’re invincible – they don’t realize and that’s the same thing with us. We didn’t realize that companies are hard, it’s a really stressful thing. Ben and I don’t ever not think about six apart – if we knew that five years ago, I don’t think we would have done it.

Grace: I spent a lot of my life trying to do the right thing and to honor my immigrant parents; people who came to this country and struggled and worked and are not acculturated, their whole reason of being and living is of giving us an opportunity and it sounds trite but it’s very true. I’m a first generation kid trying ot fulfill our parents’ objectives for us and the first thing is safety. And when I became a young adult, one of the things I wrestled with was fear, so I did a lot of things like rock climbing and rapelling and the Transamerica building (story is true but we couldn’t come down because we were arrested).

But writing is the scariest thing I’ve ever done, but I’m telling you that all of you in the community – you’ve supported me, not just in my personal blog – I keep pitching the Hurricane Katrina Relief Blog but I’m very proud of that. I’m a lifelong Democrat, like other folks I know (Arianna laughs) well, not like everyone. But one of the things we have in this country right now is this terrible polarity, and working in Mississippi I realized we’re all just people and it was great to work with these faith based Southern workers and they had this ex-hippie mother from Santa Cruz and we need to work together.

Arianna: My shifting from being a Republican to being a Democrat – that was 10 years ago and that was a long time ago. Dick Cheney was a very good friend at the time and Michael Jackson was still black. But in ’95 I began to realize that this Republican party had a lot to be desired and I also realized that I would lose my friends. I was changing my mind extremely publicly in my syndicated column. I would go to a dinner party and feel like a leper. The big problem was Dick Armey’s wife who came up to me and asked how could you do this to us, when she had been so nice to my kids. But all I could say is that we always have a right to change our minds and evolving occasionally means changing your minds. I think as women we are better at it than men, because they tend to be more rigid. I also believe there’s a place we all need that is not about politics that is deeper than politics.

Audience: About the fear. If it’s important to me and I’m not scared, then I’m really worried, because I like that little fear in the pit of my stomach to move me forward. So I feel really positively motivated when I have that little bit of fear. Question is, people always tell you to make that roadmap and follow that road map and you just follow it. And if you’re not so comfortable with what you’re doing and you want to shift – it’s not just following one thing in a straight path… I feel that there are different personalities, some are better at paths, others at horizontal jumping. I want to hear your experiences to get to where you are – did you always know this is where you wanted to be?

Carolyn: I knew a lot about what I didn’t want to do – like I didn’t want to practice tax law. I feel I made decisions through luck and longing and passion and when I hire people – you want to hire different kinds of people and different kinds of thinkers, which is really important. You need some people who are methodical and others who are all over the map. I think that my career has changed over time – I think women are much more ready to hire someone who is not so abc because most of us have gone in that other direction.

Arianna: Absolutely. I had no idea what I was going to do. I went to Cambridge and studied politics and then completely out of the blue I got an offer from a publisher to write a book. And so I really believe that when I got the call from the publisher, I told him I couldn’t write. And he wrote back and asked if I’d have lunch – and he offered to subsidize me so I could write. And that was my first book, which was published in 26 languages, and I became a writer. I do believe in accidents. And I do believe that when we use our intuition and stay open we can see what the next step is even if we have no idea what the next step is.

Mena: I never had a path. The thing I’ve really followed is this passion, this instinct about what I wanted to do at the time. With Six Apart, I was the CEO because Ben didn’t want to do it and I wanted to do it. And I was 24 – where do you go from there?  I was supposed to spend this year working on a press tour for our products. I went from CEO, to the public face – and now I’m a designer, which is right for me, because that’s what I need to do right now. It’s finding that passion, what’s the best for you to do at that time in your life and doing it. Caring about the title and not what you’re doing – it shows.

Grace: I want to acknowledge what Arianna said about intuition – as women we are taught to ignore that part of ourselves. You know what’s right – there’s that other voice that’s nagging – that’s probably your mother, or a nun. It’s probably intuition.

Audience: You talked a little bit about fear and that brings to mind obstacles that get in the way as you’re trying to move through your life and careers. Upon what do you draw your strength? And who are your heroes?

Grace: Obstacles – definitely. Being of color in a predominantly white neighborhood when I was growing up – there were no Indian people, it was a white neighborhood. Issues of self worth and lack of self worth. I had my own obstacles. But the thing that was always fortunate for me was that I always had my pilot light on and it’s there. One of the things that really struck me in this past year and it’s been a big year for me as a blogger is in responding to Katrina, I didn’t even think about the obstacles, I just thought I needed to be there somehow. I may have thought about things differently, like paying attention to liability issues. I just went for it and it was wonderful just to really focus and not look at the obstacles of litigation or that someone might not accept a donation from a bunch of Buddhists from California.

Audience: There are a lot of us who are not married with children and working in an industry that isn’t friendly to that and fear that we may be married to our careers. How have your blogs healed your fears or just one fear?

Carolyn: I’m not answering as a blogger per se – I think you’re right about people without children or significant others. The advantage of having children is that you have to go home. If you’re breastfeeding you have no choice. I worry about the people who don’t have a kid at home, it’s too easy to just work. It’s so important to create those limits. I don’t buy that since I’m a mom I have special needs that you don’t.

Chris: I moderate this panel but I’m not married and I don’t have kids.

Mena: I work with my husband and I worked with him for years before Six Apart. Having this job and having this company has been the best thing for me as a person and a woman. We went to college together, we got married after college, there was a time until a few years ago that I hadn’t been away from him for more than 10 minutes for years. I went to a conference without him and I was horribly scared. Over the past couple of years, I have discovered who we both are as people and have become different people. I find that you just have to figure out what works at that time. I don’t have kids right now, I assume I will, I don’t know. You have to balance something – whether you have kids or not.

Arianna: If I didn’t have children, I think I would have crashed. The thing I find most upsetting about workaholics is sleep deprivation because I think it’s becoming epidemic in our society and it’s especially bad for women because we try to take care of everything so we just sleep a little less. And I just want to start a movement about sleep.

Audience: What can male bloggers do to assist – how can we help you accomplish what you want to accomplish.

Mena: Stop making lists. Like Top 10 bloggers.

Chris: If you’re telling me there aren’t any women bloggers, you’re telling me you don’t read women bloggers. Link. It’s helpful. This is a networked world we live in and if there’s any evidence of that, it’s the people who have come together and the people who are watching it on the web. Because there’s so very much going on here. And you’ve heard from four very different people about how the internet is changing how we live our lives today.

Audience: What I want to know – what really excites you now and what are you doing that’s fearless?

Grace – I’m writing for a living. That is the greatest most wonderful thing I’m doing now,. I’m doing what I wanted to do when I was 10 years old.

Arianna: What most excites me is that we are about to launch a new part of our site in September. Politics Aside – everything that’s NOT politics. Mothering, sex, relationships, cooking, everything. Because however important politics is in our lives, there’s plenty that’s not politics. The editor of politics aside is here. If anyone wants to cross post with us, it’s all about linking and cross posting – it’s all about supporting each other and that’s why on becoming fearless – if anyone wants a free book, just send an email to arianna@huffington-post.com and we’ll send it next week.

Carolyn: I was thinking about this this morning and thinking that I’m really excited about what I’m doing and it’s really true and wondering if this is what happens when you’re in your 40’s. I’m just really excited and it’s good to feel that way.

Mena: The big thing about any product launch is the most exciting thing at the moment. What Vox is for is getting moms – not the moms here, but your moms – bringing blogging to the people who haven’t done it before. Just bring it to regular people, just communicating and writing is a wonderful thing.

Comments

[Marilyn]

Great job, Donna! Thanks.