good article on Jill Miller Zimon also mentions MeetTheBloggers

From Women’s eNews, here’s an article featuring our friend Jill Miller Zimon in “Journalist of the Month” and announcing her entry into local Pepper Pike politics. Gloria just told me Jill is filing her petitions at the Board of Elections right now, which is just before lunch time. In the article, Jill gleans many good comments, among them the following:

On Feb. 23, the day before Limbaugh's women's summit, a Public Polling Study showed Limbaugh--known in some circles for saying "feminism was established to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream"--has a major gender gap on his hands. In the poll 56 percent of men surveyed expressed a favorable opinion of Limbaugh, while 37 percent of women.

On the day of the summit, Miller Zimon ran excerpts of the Limbaugh program along with her comments, which were sent around the Internet by e-mail and picked up by several other blogs, including ThinkProgress.org, The Moderate Voice, and The Huffington Post.

Miller Zimon's citizen journalism earns the respect of Jay Rosen, a New York University journalism professor, and author of the influential media blog PressThink. "She has her feminist group base, and a local political base, and some new media people and Cleveland bloggers," says Rosen. "I like the way she knits together the local and the national, the political and the personal, without getting sentimental."

In writing for this diverse community, Miller Zimon is succeeding at blogging in the deepest sense, says Rosen. "The greatest characteristic of blogging is that personal expression can have the publishing might of big companies. That's the big promise of it and that's why she's successful."

There’s also mention of the influence of the MeetTheBloggers experience:

Since 2005, Miller Zimon's concern about transparency of local politics, and the power of blogging, led her to attend and blog about almost 40 local "Meet the Blogger" forums in which notable Ohio politicians and other civic leaders faced bloggers and their questions in person.

That helped spur her decision to run for public office.

"Meet the Bloggers helped expose me to just how normal people pursue politics, and why," says Miller Zimon. "Complaining and writing about it can only get you so far . . . "

Citizen Blogging Boosts Zimon into Local Politics