Women's media transformed by Internet

"It's one of the best places to be doing what we're doing," she says, "because of the strong women's and feminist communities here and the progressive nature of Minnesota, though that's not true everywhere. But if you look at what's gone on here over the decades, there remain very strong women's efforts." "I was concerned when I started up the directory again in 2000 after we hadn't published it in a number of years, because I didn't have the numbers of entries that I had in the 1970s and 1980s," she says. "But now I realise it's not a matter of numbers -- a lot of publications have been coming on internationally and in different formats so the level of communicating is great and we are probably reaching greater numbers." The Internet has been key to this, Allen says: "Inexpensively, we're able to communicate on a global level." [Phyllis Holman Weisbard] publishes Feminist Collections: A Quarterly of Women's Studies Resources, now in its 24th year, edited with colleague JoAnne Lehman. The two have carefully tracked the coming and going of feminist periodicals. Startups are encouraging, Lehman says, pointing out that "in every issue of Feminist Collections we're announcing a new print publication, plus everything from online `zines to online scholarly journals." Asked if the rise of Internet publishing has offset the decline in the availability of some older print titles, Weisbard says, "Absolutely." Two-thirds of feminist titles have online-only versions, she says.