Why Heather Armstrong Is Attending The WHCD

Bloggers are not what many people think they are. You look at someone like super mom blogger Heather Armstrong, and you might assume that her life is easy and wonder how she somehow created an empire on sharing her thoughts, her feelings, and the adventures of her children with the Internet, and why on Earth Armstrong is invited to the White House Correspondents' Dinner. You might write her off as someone who doesn't need to be taken seriously because she's "just a blogger," and "not a real journalist." And you would be very, very wrong.

The term "blogger" might have been born with the image of a young girl replacing a keyboard with a pen and diary as a place to spew all her adolescent feels, but that's not what a professional blogger is in 2015. Sure, most bloggers primarily rely on their personal experiences as a way to communicate in a relatable way with other folks on the Interweb, but only a business-savvy star can create an army of followers out of nothing.

Heather Armstrong is a blogger for her site Dooce, a mother, a self-described recovering Mormon, and above all else, she is an influencer. She speaks, and A LOT of people listen. Her social following is bonkers impressive, with more than 17K followers on Facebook, more than 40K followers on Instagram, and a whopping 1.53 million followers on Twitter.

So if the White House Correspondents' Dinner is an event to bring all the best journalists and successful media professionals together in the same room, shouldn't top influencing bloggers be part of that? According to the Washington Post, Armstrong will be attending on behalf of the Huffington Post, which has been covering the world's most pressing news and general interest stories written by bloggers since 2005, and shows no signs of losing their prominent ground in the media scene.

Armstrong is bold, hilarious, fascinating, and unapologetic in tone with the way she communicates with her fans on Dooce. Her point of view as a mother who previously struggled with postpartum depression, unemployment, and other highs and lows of love, life, and parenthood are important to so many people because she makes them feel less alone, while also not talking down to them as an expert in any of those subjects.

Armstrong is proof that the media landscape is drastically changing, but in a wonderful, human way. And isn't human connection what we need more of in a digital age?

Image: Dooce/Twitter