Last week, a group of Philadelphia bloggers banded together to get national media attention for a young mother who had been missing from home since the middle of July.
The group was frustrated that the disappearance of Latoyia Figueroa, 24, who is five months pregnant, did not get national press, though her case is similar to other widely covered disappearances like those of Natalee Holloway and Laci Peterson.
The bloggers argue that Holloway and Peterson, who are both white and good-looking, are more attractive to national broadcast media than someone like Figueroa, who is African-American and from a less affluent background.
Figueroa has been missing from her home in South Philadelphia since July 18. She has a 7-year-old son. Police said she was reported missing on July 21 by her family. On Tuesday, police said the search was ongoing and that no suspects have been named.
"How is one situation important enough to make national news, versus another story that's equally as compelling?" said Richard Blair, 51, who writes under the nom de blog Richard Cranium at The All Spin Zone.
Blair is leading the Philadelphia bloggers and has begun a reward fund in conjunction with the Citizens Crime Commission of Delaware Valley.
After writing about the disappearance and starting his reward fund, Blair posted an open letter to CNN Headline News anchor Nancy Grace.
"Latoyia Figueroa is still missing after eight days," Blair wrote. "And as tragic as the Natalee Holloway case might be, Natalee doesn't have a 7-year-old child wondering where she is, nor was Natalee (to the best of our knowledge) five months pregnant."
The next day, Howard Hall prominently featured a "Missing" poster he made in the upper right corner of his blog. It replaced a series of commercial advertisements run through a company called BlogAds. Hall said he wanted to make sure Figueroa's story was not forgotten.
"There was concern that the story would slip down," he said. Other Philadelphia bloggers copied the ad and posted it on their sites.
Through the rallying of local bloggers, the Figueroa case late last week garnered national media attention at CNN, USA Today, Fox News and other news outlets. Like this story, however, the coverage tended to focus on the blogger angle. Since then, the Figueroa case hasn't garnered much more coverage except some local press, such as in the Philadelphia Inquirer (registration required).
Robert Niles, editor of the Online Journalism Review at the University of Southern California, said the Figueroa case illustrates there's room for improvement.
"I think one of the dirty secrets of this business is that we've always been driven by the sum of our experiences," he said. "There's always been some sort of bias or point of view driving us. It's not been an overtly political one, but it's one shaped by covering certain types of stories and how these stories play out and how these stories get into the paper."
But Niles said the more bloggers or internet journalists take to their keyboards, the more news can be covered outside the current limitations of mainstream media.
"We can get more coverage for more cases that will reach more people," he said. "I think, ultimately, that is a good thing."
Blogger Matthew Gold said the Figueroa case has galvanized locals to publicize similar crimes on their sites -- a 21st-century update of the photograph on the side of a milk carton.
"If we can try and convince other people to start running these ads for free, we can make a difference," he said. "We can't cover every news story or expect the national media to cover every story, but rotating ads is something that has a lot of promise."
