Today's edition will be multimedia: books, TV, magazines, newspapers, all aggregated right here. For starters, I absolutely loved this Indianapolis Star story on working dads. It's a great piece on work on the increasingly work/family struggles of fathers. It's not unlike (and indeed cites as a major source), the Best Life magazine piece I wrote about last month. The more I think about this topic, the more I'm convinced the Best Life and Indy Star articles will mark the beginning of this as a hot media topic. Mark my words: work/life balance for men will be the next great social trend discovered by the media.

Of course, at-home fatherhood will stay on the radar, but Elizabeth over at Half Changed World put up this post last night noting all of the SAHD items she'd seen that really weren't about at-home dads. I think that's significant; stories about fathers-as-novelty-items only go so far in promoting the concept of flexible family structures. It appears that we're moving to the next stage: a serious discussion of what those flexible structures are and how families operate within them.

Finally, Real Dads magazine (which I covered in this post) is now at the printers and available at Amazon.com. The mag is starting to get more attention; here's a Mediapost.com story on it from last week. The story suggests that us guys may be coming into our own as marketing targets:

Increasingly, one particular situation is starting to get more attention: stay-at-home-dads. At a recent "Marketing to Moms" panel hosted by the Advertising Women of New York and Family Fun magazine, Maria Bailey, author of "Marketing to Moms: Getting Your Share of the Trillion Dollar Market," commented on the speed at which this segment was growing.

And to emphasize the point, I saw a minivan commercial (for Saturn's new offering) during the Broncos-Colts game yesterday that was a direct pitch to football-coachin' guys, using the "you need this car for all the fathering you do" approach. It struck me as novel. I've can't remember ever seeing a car marketed to men in quite this way (back-to-the-wildness-with-family SUV escapism excepted). Am I missing good examples, or is this quietly revolutionary?