I saw a news item reporting on the five winners of the first-ever Mommy Blogger Awards. This is significant on a number of levels, starting with the sponsor of the awards. This isn’t the Webbys or some awards program from new media publisher. It’s Scholastic. The folks who gave us Clifford the Big Red Dog, Harry Potter (in the U.S.), and Captain Underpants, not to mention school book fairs, is the company behind the Mommy Blogger Awards.

More specifically, it’s Scholastic’s Parent and Child Magazine that sponsored voting that wrapped up last Saturday. When an old-guard publishing business recognizes the importance of the blogosphere, it’s time to admit that social media—at least this part of it—has gone mainstream.

It’s a smart move on Scholastic’s part. Parent and Child Magazine targets exactly the same readers who read mommy blogs. Creating a relationship with both the bloggers and their readers is a good idea. Doing it in a non-competitive way—like, say, through a mommy blogger recognition program—is an even better idea.

The winning blogs also point to the mainstreaming of social media. One of the winners, “Salsa in China,” has a store and about 625,000 visits per week. Another, Momisodes, attracts 350,000 visits a week and takes in advertising dollars.

These don’t yet approach the numbers of Better Homes & Gardens (7.6 million) or Good Housekeeping (4.6 million). On the other hand, Salsa in China’s readership every week is roughly the same as the circulation of Men’s Fitness magazine (the print edition). These mommy blogs are not just blogs. They’re media properties. They attract readers, sell advertising, manage e-commerce sites. Their use of blogging platforms is incidental. Salsa in China and other comparable mommy blogs deserve the same respect and status as Barron’s (300,000 subscribers) and Wine Spectator (345,000 subscribers). It’s not silly or pointless for GM to make nice with mommy bloggers when they command readership numbers that rival the magazines in which companies have traditionally advertised.

Of course, that also means that pitching these media properties is every bit as legitimate an activity as it is pitching to Smart Money (820,000 subscribers) or Conde Nast Traveler (780,000 subscribers).

(This doesn’t excuse off-target, lame, clueless pitching. It does kinda irk me that all those bloggers who complain about being inundated with bad pitches seem to suffer under the belief that they are the exclusive recipients of such garbage. Talk to a reporter. They’ve been getting clueless pitches and lame press releases for decades. Hell, I got too much of it when I was a reporter, and that goes back to 1977; I remember stacks and stacks of mail containing unbelievably bad press releases.)

But once your website becomes a full-blown media property, it’s ridiculous to think you should be exempt from outreach by PR people trying to get their clients’ stories told.