Meet Rachel Feddersen

Photo by Sarah Amato

Good morning! (It's still morning in New York, anyway.) When I enthusiastically signed up to blog for a week, it felt like my assignment was ages away, so far in the future I didn't even need to start thinking about it. But, as usual, time passed, and suddenly it's now, and I have nothing in the can ready to go. So everyone at Bonnier gets to hear about how nutty things are at Parenting.com right now, because that's all I got.

This is one of our biggest weeks of the year, when we launch two huge projects for Babytalk magazine: Love Your New-Mom Body, and our Babytalk cover contest, which we do in collaboration with Good Morning America, the juggernaut of a morning television show. Both require intense editorial and technical preparation, plus tons of checking and re-checking of things such as server load, file format, registration requirements, and on and on. Note to self: don't schedule both of these projects to launch at the same time next year. 

This week is also the launch of a Parenting magazine initiative called Mom Congress. We want to get moms across the country talking to each other about issues that really matter. First issue: schools. Tomorrow there's a press conference in Washington, D.C. to kick it off. A huge group of Parenting people is going down; Acting Deputy Editor Jessica Dukes is attending for Parenting.com.

What else is going on this week? Oh, just continuing to re-imagine our entire business/editorial structure, shooting some maternity swimsuits for an online-only photo gallery, banging out some concepts on editorial packages that could be ultra-appealing to really big advertisers... And I'm giving the Parenting Group a lightning recap of all the panels I attended at South by Southwest Interactive, which was AWESOME. My favorite panel: neocartography, all about crowd-sourced maps. So cool, and so relevant for so many of us (skiing, fishing, hunting, sailing, etc). I rushed the panel after the presentation and handed out business cards left and right.

So, today is the launch of Love Your New-Mom Body. It's a program we started last year in the hopes that we could harness some of the energy and soothe some of the anxiety that new mothers feel about getting back into shape and feeling like themselves again after having a baby. It's a multiplatform program: 12 weeks of newsletters, a three-month series of articles in Babytalk magazine, a spa-vacation sweepstakes, exercise videos from a company called Strollerfit, and message boards where moms can support each other. It's such a rich package, I'm probably forgetting something.

And it may sound silly, but what I'm most excited about for the LYNMB launch is the tickers (they'll actually be launching in a week or two, in the middle of the program), those little countdown bars you can put in your message board signature. I've been wanting to do tickers at Parenting.com for a long time, and this seemed like a good program to launch with. Nothing like visibly tracking your progress to keep a reader involved in a program (and not incidentally, broadcast our program to anyone who reads her message board posts). I'm hoping to do the same thing with a pregnancy countdown ticker, among other things, but this is the kind of technology that could work for any kind of course: shaping up for skiing (water or snow), cooking a whole set of dishes that characterize a particular cuisine, you name it.

Tomorrow: More on the Babytalk/GMA Cover Contest. Highlight: our slide show called "Why Did My Mom Put Me In A....Crockpot?"