Last night, just after midnight, group administrator Hannah Wood sent the following information in a mass e-mail to members of the Facebook group devoted to finding missing New York City middle school teacher Hannah Emily Upp:

We wish we could be writing to you saying she’s been found, but right now we must allow ourselves to be comforted by the United Federation of Teachers’ incredibly generous offer of a $10,000 reward for information leading to Hannah’s whereabouts. This is in addition to the $2,000 offered by NYPD Crime Stoppers...

Later, in the same message, Wood wrote:

It’s now been over a week since anyone last saw Hannah, and thus the quest to find her has assumed a new and serious urgency. We know that your lives will go on – they must – but we ask you from the very depths of our being to please keep our amazing, beautiful, wonderful friend in your thoughts. Continue to keep in touch: receiving your emails and messages means more to us, and to Hannah (wherever she is), than you might ever imagine...

Were this not a season for storms and politics, it is likely that Hannah Upp's mysterious disappearance from her apartment on August 29 would be receiving major play from cable news networks like CNN and MSNBC. Since it isn't -- yet -- major blogs and newspapers have taken up the slack.

Ian Spiegelman, weekend editor of the enormously popular Gawker.com, was unusually serious (for Gawker) in his post about Hannah's disappearance. Spiegelman wrote, "This is actually important. And anyone using this thread to make a certain old complaint about the media and missing people, you'll get banned instantly."

Spiegelman was referring to a now pro forma complaint often issued by many in the blogosphere whenever a missing persons story about a white female gets a lot of airplay. While it is true that there is inequity in the way these cases are covered by the mainstream news (recall Fox News -- for example -- and its wall-to-wall coverage of the Natalee Holloway disappearance in the summer of 2005), it is also true that some stories receive the level of coverage they do because they don't have easy explanations -- it is the mystery that draws attention to the case as much as anything.

With Hannah Upp, the yeoman's work being done by her friends from Bryn Mawr has a lot to do with the story making it to a blog that doesn't normally touch such a story -- like Gawker. As soon as it was clear that something was seriously wrong, that there was no logical explanation for Hannah vanishing into thin air, friends like Hannah Wood and Arielle Schechter began contacting anyone and everyone they could think of to get the word out. Sometimes I think we should focus less on the media's occasional feeding frenzy on cases like this and more on the positive aspect -- that Hannah Upp had friends so committed to finding her that they used every networking tool they could think of to let the world know something was wrong.

Anyone who knows anything about Hannah Upp's disappearance -- please call Detective Perez at the 30th Precinct. You can call either 212-690-8842 or 212-690-8843.

And just so it's clear, I'll echo the Gawker editor on this score -- any of that usual bitching "about the media and missing people, you'll get banned instantly."

[Facebook: "We're Not Giving Upp (on Hannah)"]