Day two of the Online News Association kicked off with a keynote by Lisa Stone of Blogher, a network of blogs that reaches more than 15 million women a month.

This is the first ONA she has been able to attend, even though she grew up wanting to work for newspapers.

She describes her career path as “accidental,” where due to personal circumstances she ended up at WebTV and Women.com.

The idea behind Blogher is to work with the women and source ideas from women online about the trajectory of life “that was not something I was seeing in other newsrooms.”

The aim was not to build a business, but build a community and consider how to make money afterwards.

“It was terrifying,” says Stone to nervous laughter in the room.

In her view, there is a huge appetite for news and information from women that isn’t met by traditional media.

Blogher is the 7th latest blog network in the world and Stone attributes the success of it to traditional news values.

The network has 2,500 blogs by women and men and syndicate content of blogs that sign our editorial standards. These are based on established journalistic values. The network has several hundred members who loosely police the blogs.

Stone stresses how Blogher insists on a strict separation between editorial and business.

“We became the school moms of the internet,” says Stone. Bloggers are not allowed to take a product and write about it.

Stone quotes from Blogher’s annual survey that women’s use of social media is accelerating – 53% of women use social networks.

Twitter is important for sharing information, but the most important user is the blogger, says Stone.

Women bloggers are reading every day, blog all the time, 80% use social networks and 35% use Twitter.

Stone explains how women bloggers mix hard and soft news, rather than an “1984 women’s page.” The idea is not to build a “pink silo” for women.

Interestingly, Stone says that some of their bloggers feel limited by tools such as Twitter – they “want long-form as well as short-form story-telling.”

The women blog for fun, but also to express themselves, connect with others, record their day or provide advice.

“She is not abandoning news, she is abandoning print,” says Stone, and we should take heart from that.  “The appetite is so enormous.”

While the use of media by women is accelerating, women, she explains, don’t feel they have the perfect device yet.

For Stone, her bloggers are the “perfect advocates” for established media. 85% of women bought a product based on the recommendation of a blogger.

“Getting involved with women blogging in your topic of expertise can support what you are doing massively.”