Coming after intense criticism from all sides of the LGBT journalism community GLAAD today announced it will reinstate the Outstanding Blog category but not until the 28th Annual GLAAD Media Awards to be held in 2017.
GLAAD also released the following statement:
It’s become abundantly clear that we were wrong to remove the Outstanding Blog category, and we apologize. Although we cannot make changes to this year’s slate of categories and nominees, the Outstanding Blog category will be reinstated in 2017 with improved selection criteria that ensures grassroots LGBT voices are given the recognition they’re due. And like in years past, there will be no submission fee required in the category.
The contributions of LGBT bloggers and independent media have been critical to the advancement of this movement and, indeed, GLAAD’s mission. Eliminating the Outstanding Blog category was an affront to the tireless efforts of those whose work has been essential to putting a spotlight on the issues LGBT people face, and which too often goes overlooked. Removing the category was wrong, and we are committed to doing better.
What people don’t know is that sources from within GLAAD made a decision over 6 months ago that they were going to drop the category completely and stayed silent about the omission of the Outstanding Blog Award in hoped that others would not notice or care.
Two weeks ago after this blogger himself, Mark King of My Fabulous Disease and Alvin McEwan of Holy Bullies and Headless Monsters found out about the omission we raised the alarm on a private listserve where after 2 days of discussion Seth Adams, Communications Director of GLAAD wrote in a rather brusque missivethat the award would be back in 2017 because GLAAD could “not figure out what a blog was” and then went silent and ignored all of our complaints
So now, 2 weeks later GLAAD posts on its website about its “mistake” because they started to get bad press over it. But still they are sticking to the 2017 inclusion and REFUSE even with all the damage that they have done and bridges they have burned within the grassroots independent LGBT media community to make any extra effort to re-instate the Outstanding Blog Award this year regardless of the fact that there is plenty of time.
GLAAD will hopefully re-think this. Grassroots independent journalist have been the promoter of GLAAD and its causes for years. Perhaps we should all wait a year before covering anything for them.
I sure hope MSNBC and The Washington Post posts their press releases and events till then.
Because we’re not.