The New York Times has an article in its paper today discussing the stressful nature of blogging as an occupation. Apparently a number of prominent bloggers have even suffered massive heart attacks in recent weeks. The demand to constantly produce new and entertaining things to say can be overwhelming at times, especially when the supply of new things to write about just dry up. Take the 2008 presidential campaign, for instance. The presidential candidates have laid out their platforms, and the number of bloggers who make do just copying some Obama press release or some Clinton press release is so staggering that trying to stay up above it all and not be affiliated with or, as the political scientists used to say, captured by any campaign — while obviously having opinions and preferences — can be aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa…
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Jim, I know you’re writing this sarcastically, and your point is well taken. As I discovered on Friday, just by doing a little bit of looking around on activist web sites, there’s a lot of interesting, under-reported information about political activist events that’s not being reported on elsewhere.
All it takes is tuning out the MSNBC-CNN-Fox echo chamber, and opening your own eyes. There’s a lot of good work that bloggers can do, rather than just copying news that someone else has reported on already.
We do our share of commenting on the big news of the day, and I think that doing so is a valid thing for independent writers with blogs to do. However, we make sure to mix in original content and information that’s not available through the big news channels. I think that’s a responsibility.
To have the New York Times write about independent news and information web sites is just not credible. They’ve been biased from the beginning, and for good reason. The establishment news operations have often had their credibility undermined by independent online writers. How they must long for the days when the only backtalk there was from the public was through letters to the editor… that could be selected and edited before publication.
Does that include eye stress? What’s with the new appearance? The main posts written in letters so big they jump out at you. The widgets so tiny they fog up your bifocals. I don’t know whether to increase or decrease my text size.
And where’s all that weird prose about paths in the masthead? I liked that.
yoos dont no stres. wen yoos chazd by dawgs al dey, den yoos ken tel me bout stres.