Some six hundred women (and a few men too) articulated the need for strong, independent voices at WAM -- Women, Action and the Media -- hosted by the Center for New Words at MIT’s Stata Center this weekend.

Eighty-eight year old Helen Thomas, known for her direct, fearless questions as a (current!) member of the White House Press Corps, kicked off the conference with a powerful keynote on Friday night. She rattled off her impressions of each president from the fifty-seven years she spent covering them, and lamented the “fear factor” that caused the media to “roll over and played dead” after 9/11. It wasn’t until Hurricane Katrina, she said, that she feels “reporters were unleashed” by their editors and corporate heads.

What gives her the courage to stand up to President Bush the way she does? “I look at presidents and say: ‘You’re a public servant – ‘I pay you.’” Thomas quipped, garnering much applause.

To paint a picture of the disastrous conditions created by the war on terror, the next day’s keynote address was delivered by Iraqi journalist Haifa Zangana. “If you ask [an] Iraqi woman, she will say: ‘Today is worse than yesterday; yesterday is worse than [the] day before.” Zangana explained that the female independent bloggers who have tried to tell the real story in Iraq have been silenced.

During a lunch caucus, Julie Drizin from J-Lab – the organization that funded NeighborMedia with a New Voices grant – talked about their latest funding initiative, New Media Women Entrepreneurs. Drizin said that while two-thirds of journalism majors in this country are female, women make up only one-third of print newsrooms. She attributes this to the usual challenges for women, such as balancing home and work life, and the demands of the journalism profession.

In describing the need for projects like NeighborMedia, Drizin said the mainstream media “do not have their pulse on what’s going on in communities.” And of the fine line between neighborhood activism and journalism? “Projects that have a perspective,” she believes, “are much more inspiring.” She says the next big question is going to be the relationship between emerging media and what she calls “legacy” media institutions.

Stay tuned for useful tips from some of the workshops I attended: Blogging, The Future of Investigative Journalism and Making Internet TV (featuring CCTV’s own Elisa Kreisinger)!