In addition to being a (new!) Take Part blogger, I’m also a former associate blog editor at The Huffington Post.

Over the summer, I conducted a study of male versus female bloggers who are featured on the front page of HuffPost.  (Note: I didn’t count the number of male versus female bloggers on the entire site, just the home page of the site.)

Like the big nerd that I am, every day at 9am and 4pm for two months, I counted the number of male versus female blogger bylines on the front page of HuffPost and recorded my findings in a GoogleDocs spreadsheet.

Of 1,125 front page blogger bylines counted, 255 belonged to women.  That’s only 23%!  Not once did the number of women’s bylines equal the number of men’s.  The site’s editor-in-chief, Arianna Huffington, accounted for over one-fifth of those bylines.

My findings have been published in the media watchdog group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting’s magazine, Extra!, which you can read right here.

I interned at FAIR as an undergrad at NYU and worked on another byline study there, with managing editor Julie Hollar, regarding Newsweek, Time and US News & World Reports.  That data is tied into my most recent study to make a larger point about women opinionmakers.

As a former employee, I’m now allowed to — and not going to — discuss the internal workings of HuffPost.  But I can be reached at jessica [period] wakeman [at] gmail [dot] com with any questions regarding how I performed my study and what I believe the findings indicate.

Once the current Federal bailout package for Wall Street comes together, Treasury Secretary Henry (Hank) Paulson will become The Check Writer-In-Chief. Spurred by the recent collapse of the entire industry of investment banking in the United States, the Federal Government is crafting a bailout package in upwards of $700 Billion in the hopes of salvaging the financial industry and, we’re told, the US economy. Once that package is agreed to by Congress and the White House, there will be one man in charge of implementing it - Treasury Secretary Paulson, giving him, one man, what is to be the largest spending power in the history of money. Given that, thanks to the priorities of the press in this country, I know far more about Sarah Palin’s hunting trips and the background of her supposed son-in-law to be Levi Johnston than I do about the Treasury Secretary this is more than a little disturbing.

So let’s find out about this guy. Hank Paulson was born in Palm Beach, Florida and attained the rank of Eagle Scout in the Boy Scouts of America. He is 62 years old. He attended Dartmouth College for his undergraduate degree and went on to Harvard Business School for his Masters in Business Administration. All of this sounds good so far. He’s an overachiever and went to some top schools. He worked in in the Federal government previously as an assistant to the Assistant Secretary of Defense at the The Pentagon then went on to work in the Nixon Administration as a staff assistant. While this might not be my favorite White House in US History, it stands to reason that many top Republican policymakers worked there in their youth.

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Arianna’s post this weekend is all about online giving: how it’s becoming more popular, young people are spearheading a lot of online efforts and essentially, the internet is changing the face of charity.

Donations overall increased in 2007 and it was the first time in U.S. history that charitable giving surpassed $300 billion. (online donations accounted for close to $7 billion in 2006.)

Arianna suggests that “A key element of many of these new nonprofits is that they allow donors to connect directly to those they are helping” like Kiva.org and DonorsChoose.org.

For me, donating online is about expediency and discovery.

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Social Action + Cinema Videos of the Day:

1) Arianna Huffington breaks down the media

For the Cinema YouTube Video of the Day, Click here >>>

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