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Brigham Young University – Hawaii
06/14/2012 | News release
BYUH 2007 grad Riley is one of several nationally read Mormon mommy bloggers
distributed by noodls on 06/14/2012 19:08
The Alt Design Summit is the largest design convention in the ever-growing realm of lifestyle blogging, and this year the convention named Erin Jane Riley's blog "Jane Reaction" a must-read. Erin Jane graduated from BYU-Hawaii with a bachelor's degree in Fine Arts in 2007. Upon graduating, Riley pursued further design education in Portland, Ore., and began to develop a blog to showcase her work. Since Alt deemed janereaction.com an up-and-coming blog in the design world, Riley has received an outpouring of offers and a spike in new readers.
In recent years, the media has taken note of the popularity of blogs written by young, artistically educated and technologically savvy Mormon bloggers. Many of these women are younger than 30 years of age. They split their post subjects between style, recipes and design alongside the joys and struggles of being mothers and wives.
To understand the significance and power of these blogs, one must merely look at the numbers. Popular Mormon blogger Sydney Poulton studied Graphic Design at BYU Idaho and reports 1,150,000 monthly visitors to her site, according to her website thedaybookblog.com. There are hundreds of lifestyle blogs in the digital community, yet Alt Design Summit reports that a large percentage of the sites that receive the most traffic continue to be written by those of the LDS faith.
Many Mormon bloggers include links to mormon.org in their profiles, or address reader's questions about the faith publicly. Stephanie Nielson, of "The NieNie Dialogues" offers a free Book of Mormon to any interested readers. Naomi Davis of "The Rockstar Diaries" posts about her family's General Conference traditions. Both blogs maintain a following of hundreds of thousands of readers. Whether bloggers choose to speak about their values or take a subtler approach, readers are inevitably influenced by the values they portray in their uplifting journals of everyday life.
Erin Jane Riley addressed the subject of her faith in a special post entitled "Q & A: Why are there so many creative Mormon bloggers?" Riley sites a talk given by Elder M. Russell Ballard, of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, of the LDS faith as inspiration for her blog. "We are torn down by a lot of content that is circulated on the internet and on television. Our minds can be filled with negativity and filth," Riley explains. "On the the other hand, I believe these tools can be used for so much good. We can learn so much, reach out to people we could never have reached otherwise, and share all of the good things that we personally are creating or doing."
Elder Ballard admonished LDS Church members to "join the conversation by participating on the Internet to share the gospel and to explain in simple and clear terms the message of the Restoration." Erin Jane is one who has made an effort to follow Ballard's council. At the same time, Riley has used her immense creative talent to carve a unique space for herself in the blogging community. Riley paints an honest and aesthetically pleasing portrait of her life as a freelance graphic designer and new mother for readers-a life that is much more than cupcakes and crafts.
