Too much time, not enough time
Bloggers have too much time on their hands? How about reporters and editors? You might think that NYT reporters and editors have way too much time on their hands when you see inanity like this making its way into the newspaper:
They work long hours, often to exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece — not garments, but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop…A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment…
some are starting to wonder if something has gone very wrong. In the last few months, two among their ranks have died suddenly…there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging…It is unclear how many people blog for pay, but there are surely several thousand…
The NYT has enough time for foolishness, but not always for reporting. For example, while the paper had time and space for “death by blogging” and some trivial bashing of Senator Clinton the other day, it apparently never had time (or inclination) to do a single news story that quoted the most offensive remarks of Jeremiah Wright, so that its readers could properly evaluate that controversy. Perhaps a little story like that just doesn’t have the profound news content of two guys who had heart attacks. HT: MM
April 6th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
If they describe blogging as a toxic misuse of time, just imagine what they’d say about commenting.
Come to think of it, the blogger does all the hard work–assembling references, weighing arguments and counterarguments, laboring to write lucidly and persuasively, etc–and the commenters toss in facile one-liners if they happen to feel like it.
Maybe we’re the smart ones.
April 6th, 2008 at 6:16 pm
Translation: citizen journalism is hard and bad for your health… why don’t you just leave all the heavy lifting to us professionals and not obsess so much about concepts like “truth” and “objectivity” that don’t really exist anyway?