The few, the proud, the Utah daddy bloggers
John Kinnear, center, and his two children. Kinnear writes the popular Ask Your Dad Blog.
Jason Dunnigan, right, and his son. Dunnigan, who lives in Salt Lake City, writes The Modern Dad, a dad blog that has gotten considerable online traffic.
Dunnigan often includes fashion picks -- for both baby and adult -- on his blog.
The Dunnigans' son has no shortage of flair.
Jason and his wife, Emily, far left, often team up on his blog these days. “It’s a thing we do together now, which is what parenting is.”
Utah is no stranger to female bloggers, especially those of the “mommy blog” variety. Citing a 2012 Scarborough Research study, online news outlet Mashable stated that 35 percent of moms in Salt Lake City read or contributed to blogs within 30 days of the survey. That was by the far the highest rate of engagement in any American city. It’s an understatement to say Utah moms love blogs.
But what about dads?
Do a Google search for “Utah dad blogs” and you’ll find only a handful of them. While “daddy blogs” are catching on elsewhere, especially California and New York, they haven’t yet taken root in Utah. What is it like to be one of the lone dad bloggers where mommy blogs are queen? The Herald spoke with a few Utah dad bloggers about their unique undertaking.
NEW TERRAIN
In a way, Salt Lake City’s Jason Dunnigan envies Utah mommy bloggers. They can meet up with relative ease and talk about their blogs, brainstorm blog ideas, etc. Dunnigan, who writes the blog The Modern Dad, doesn’t have that luxury.
“It is hard, coming from a guy’s perspective,” Dunnigan said in a phone interview. He has plenty of female blogger friends, but gets a little irked when their feedback doesn’t quite fit. “OK, I’m not making a craft. That’s not what I do,” he quipped half-jokingly.
Of course, that’s not to say all of Utah’s mom bloggers just do arts and crafts. But Dunnigan has had to blaze his own trail in a terrain that Utah fathers don’t usually traverse. The Modern Dad features a mix of things one might still expect on a mom blog — recipes, fashion, parenting advice and stories — albeit often with a male/dad twist. Dunnigan mentioned a jogging stroller he reviewed.
“I talk more about how the shocks are great on it, it’s easy on turns,” he said. “Kind of like when guys are talking about cars, I’ll talk the same way about a stroller.”
Dunnigan started The Modern Dad in 2013 while his wife, Emily, was pregnant with their first child. He had been working at Babinski’s Baby, a popular baby products store in Salt Lake City, and male customers often expressed appreciation that there was another guy there who could give them product feedback.
“And then as I started researching more I started finding out there are a lot of stay-at-home dads here, and a lot of guys that actually do these things — they just don’t get online and write about it,” he said.
Since then, The Modern Dad has grown considerably, attracting almost 100,000 views per month. Social media plays a big part for Dunnigan, and he said Pinterest is often where he sees the most engagement. Dunnigan said it’s been interesting to watch the rather clandestine way his male audience chooses to interact. Whenever fellow fathers engage him about his blog, it’s either in person or in direct emails, but rarely in comments — usually prefaced by saying their wife made them read his blog.
Dunnigan estimates he spends 20-30 hours a week on The Modern Dad. (“I’d say it’s almost a full-time job,” he added.) It’s an impressive feat, considering he also works another full-time job and does a lot of cooking and cleaning at home. To him, that’s what it means to be a modern dad.
“I don’t come home and expect my wife to do all those things,” he said. “I feel like the modern dad is the person that goes and works and brings in the income for his family, but at the end of the day he comes home and is still there and active, and participating in his family’s lives.”
FATHER FIRST, BLOGGER SECOND
In a relatively short period of time, John Kinnear has become a substantial voice in the dad blogging world. The Salt Lake City father of two’s blog, Ask Your Dad Blog, has 17,000 Facebook followers, and he’s an administrator for an online group of more than a thousand dad bloggers. Yet he can only recall one other Utah dad blog, the popular Single Dad Laughing. (Dunnigan, too, knew of only Single Dad Laughing; he and Kinnear don’t seem to be aware of each other.)
Reading Ask Your Dad Blog, it’s easy to see why Kinnear has succeeded. His posts are insightful (“Dear Hypothetically Gay Son”), practical (“5 Tips for Taking Toddlers Out to Dinner”) and often refreshingly irreverent (“5 Children’s Books That Don’t Exist But Should”). “Dear Hypothetically Gay Son” was featured on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” and his readership skyrocketed after that. Ask Your Dad Blog covers quite a bit of ground, but Kinnear tries to keep it casual.
“I always try to take the approach of never wanting to come across as thinking I’m an expert in anything,” Kinnear said in a phone interview. “I’m just struggling my way through it, trying to be less wrong.”
Unlike Dunnigan, Kinnear only spends a few hours a week working on his blog. Interestingly, their day jobs are both in digital marketing.
“I never really want it to be a job,” Kinnear said. “I like my job … and then I can come home and vent a little bit online, and grow a community around talking about the things I care about. But if I want to step away for a week or two I don’t feel bad about it, because it’s not my job.
“I think of myself as a father first, and the blog is a nice way to remind me of that,” he continued. “My daily decisions and the way I think through things no longer just impact me, but my family and my kids. And I think one nice thing about the blog is that it helps me kind of keep a ‘father first’ mentality.”
Kinnear acknowledged his blog will surely change as his kids get older. Dan Pearce, who runs Single Dad Laughing, spoke with the Herald in a brief phone conversation but declined to be interviewed, saying his blog started as a dad blog but drifted from that focus as his son got older and he became more aware of his son’s need for privacy.
For now, though, Kinnear is seeing his blog far exceed his initial expectations. Occasionally, his blog posts will show up in his Facebook feed, posted by his childhood friends — though these acquaintances don’t realize their old buddy is the author.
“I’ll see it in my feed, like, ‘Yeah, this guy really gets it!’ ” he said. “And I’m like, ‘Hah, yeah he does. I wrote it.’ “