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Writers Find Blogging To Be a Stressful Method of Reporting
Posted by
Soulskill
on Sun Apr 06, 2008 10:55 AM
from the get-your-bloggercise dept.
from the get-your-bloggercise dept.
Andrew Feinberg points out a New York Times story about the stress put upon prolific bloggers to maintain a constant flow of content in order to satisfy both consumers and advertisers in the information age. When breaking a story first can generate thousands more page views and clicks, many bloggers are finding themselves chained to their computers, worrying that they'll miss something important if they step away. Quoting:
" 'I haven't died yet,' said Michael Arrington, the founder and co-editor of TechCrunch, a popular technology blog. The site has brought in millions in advertising revenue, but there has been a hefty cost. Mr. Arrington says he has gained 30 pounds in the last three years, developed a severe sleeping disorder and turned his home into an office for him and four employees. 'At some point, I'll have a nervous breakdown and be admitted to the hospital, or something else will happen. This is not sustainable,' he said."
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[+]
Technology: Blogging Now Good for You, Still Bad for Some 60 comments
Several users have alerted us to a May Scientific American article that has been getting some attention more recently. Apparently, blogging is now good for you and, at least in this context, is the suggested reason for the explosion of blogging. This is quite the departure from some of the results we have seen in practice for more prolific bloggers.
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Reminds me of Maddox (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Reminds me of Maddox (Score:5, Interesting)
When you can see the news any moment, you expect the news every moment. When people read newspapers primarily, it was considered acceptable to not be up-to-date until the next day. Then came radio, then TV news, then internet news sites (with full-length articles), then blogs. Now, microblog [wikipedia.org] services like Twitter [twitter.com] are pushing the boundaries of what we consider "up-to-date". When 9-11 happened, I knew people who didn't found out until late afternoon. If the same happened today, it would be a shock if someone hadn't heard within the hour.
I'm not surprised that it's exhausting to be a news blogger; it's hard enough just being a paper reporter. But, then again: those who love to do it will continue to do it.
Parent
Re:Reminds me of Maddox (Score:5, Insightful)
More bloggers need a sister site or blog-ring which will is updating during their 'off' hours.
It doesn't matter how much you love what you do if it burns you out or ruins your health.
Parent
Re:Reminds me of Maddox (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the problem is:"The site has brought in millions in advertising revenue...in the last three years...turned his home into an office for him and four employees." Millions of dollars in three years and he's only got four employees and is working out of his home? Get an office and hire some more people you penny pinching fool! Or cash out, put the money in high interest savings, and work part time to supplement the $80k+ a year that $2 million will earn in interest. Look at the decades it takes to gross a few million as a plumber or mechanic or teacher or police officer and then tell me how hard it is to write a blog. Sure it might be more intense it the short term to maintain a highly successful blog, but it it allows you to retire in five years instead of a career of forty years, your sum total of stress and difficulty is going to be far far less in the end.
Parent
fat and rich (Score:4, Insightful)
I gained 30 lbs once, and I've since dropped the weight, but I have nothing to show for it. I wonder if we'll get an article here soon about how executives making millions of dollars are stressed out.
Re:fat and rich (Score:5, Informative)
Plus if you think you can retire on what's leftover there I think that is a bit unrealistic. Say he has 1M leftover. Assuming a risk-free rate of 5% that's $50,000 per year. That used to be a starting California programmer's salary in the late 90's. I don't know about anyone else but I didn't feel rich. You definitely cannot support a family on that supposing he has one. Certainly you won't be renting an island, a chef and prostitutes for $50K/year.
-- John.
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Re:fat and rich (Score:5, Insightful)
The greed behind thinking "I *must* make $100k+ to survive" is one of the many factors sending this industry down the toilet.
Parent
Re:No, you are wrong about that, money talks (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll agree with you that they should all strive to make six figures, but the reality is that the supply far exceeds the demand, and the talent pool is relatively shallow on average. I know people working just as hard, for just as many hours, usually at multiple jobs, to barely make ends meet. They do it because they don't have the training or ability to perform work that has a higher value in society. Heck, I could make more as a doctor or a lawyer, but I really like being an engineer and I spent my college money to become one.
As for finding a mate, they one's who are primarily interested in the size of your wallet are much more likely to leave you if that wallet ever deflates. I recommend finding one who would marry you if you lost every penny you had in the world. You'll be a lot happier than if you make $100k and had someone who constantly griped about not having enough money to live the way he or she likes.
Parent
Re:No, you are wrong about that, money talks (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, there are quite a few PhDs out there blogging. They are hardly "useless in their fields", at least the ones I read; they tend to be some of the more high profile people (and the blogs simply give them an even higher profile). Two cases in point for economics: Greg Mankiw's blog [blogspot.com] and Marginal Revolution [marginalrevolution.com], a blog by two George Mason profs with occasional guest bloggers.
Blogging is actually fairly amenable to the goal of many academics: to share information and debate about it. The biggest downside that I see is that blogging is fairly time consuming. Mankiw turned off comments to his blog because he didn't have time to moderate them, so his blog became more of a one-way street.
Of course, econ is just one field; I honestly don't know how prevalent blogging is in other fields.
Parent
Re:No, you are wrong about that, money talks (Score:4, Interesting)
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Let me get this straight... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Let me get this straight... (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think that's the point they are trying to make. I think that what they were trying to get across was that blogging has become just as difficult to keep up with as traditional media but instead of having a team of researchers working around the clock to handle news feeds, fact checking, etc, you have less than a handful of people doing the work that used to take many many more.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
this is what happens when normal people start pretending to be geeks. the drama starts. I expect a FOX special report on this pretty soon. "Blogs: The Silent Killers of People Prone to Getting Fat After Sitting on Their Ass for a Long Time"
I don't hear the Slashdot crew whining about reporting news for over 10 years. I guess they really like what they really do and don't feel the need for guilttripping themselves
Re:Let me get this straight... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd like to feel bad for him, but - as a small business owner with 5 employees and noticeably less than a million dollars in annual revenue - I just can't seem to get the tears going while I browse the 'net at lunch from my office.
Parent
I wrote a poem about this once (Score:3, Interesting)
Also in the News (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously, does anyone get their 'news' from blogs? Granted they can be interesting and helpful, they are often written with no editing and read more like "On the Road" than The New York Times.
Congratulations on developing income through traffic but it pains me to see people use this as a way to stay informed.
If you never leave your basement you're not reporting, you're aggregating or spinning.
Re:Also in the News (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm sure a small minority do (in the same way that some get their news from the John Stewart Show), but the real question is why those chanting Old Media is Dead haven't yet noticed that news comes from, and will continue to come from professional reporters. You know, the folks that took the time to study journalism and are typically employed by newspapers, news organisations, and a dwindling number of media companies that can still afford them?
Granted they can be interesting and helpful
Indeed. They do have a contribution to make, but usually that's in the form of commentary, added background or trivia, or even some personal insight. At their best they also provide links to some authoritive reporting, and at worst, incestuous links to other blogs.
Bloggers complaining about stress should visit a real news room. They might discover that the act of reporting (or the writing part of it) is a lot harder than sitting in a Starbucks with a Mac waxing poetic while contemplating current events.
Parent
Bloggers need better technology (Score:3, Interesting)
8 solutions (Score:3, Funny)
[_] Go hunting with Dick Cheney - problem solved!
[_] Dude! If you've gained 30 pounds, sustenance isn't your problem. More like "sustenance abuse."
[_] Get a bigger chair - it'll sustain your additional weight.
[_] Get up and go for a walk. There's a reason the dot-com boom had lots of dogs in offices - it forced people to get up and walk their dogs! This got them away from their computers for a bit, so that when they came back, they were refreshed, and more productive.
[_] Set your site up as Yahoo!'s "ugly sister" for when Microsoft is looking for more "sustenance".
[_] More typeing and less eating.
[_] Move to a real office instead of working from home - or LOCK THE FRIDGE!
[_] Profit from it - start a blog about how blogging makes you fat. Lots of fat people will then take up blogging, as their "excuse" for being fattarded wankers.
got enough adverts there, bud? (Score:5, Insightful)
How can people stand to go there on a regular basis?
This is a typical case of self control (Score:4, Insightful)
This isn't really about blogging, it's about small business. Small, one man shops really are a drain on your life. You fear that if you close too early or open too late you'll miss that one big customer. Until you get big enough to spread the load, that will be the case.
A note for bloggers - you might want to move. There were two in that story - one in SF, one (I believe) in NY. Note: you're bloggers, nobody cares where you live and you can source from anywhere in the (US/NA/World). Based on the "all day and night at the keyboard" comments, these folks aren't getting their inside scoops from wandering the streets of the big technology cities. Might I suggest somewhere inexpensive, somewhere relaxing from which to blog. Make it within 100 miles of an airline hub if you do a lot of conferences. Office space in small towns is often $8/SF (per year) or less, and really good housing is actually affordable on 40k-50k/yr.
So what else is new? (Score:4, Insightful)
Nothing to see here, move along....
Stop mangling submissions. (Score:5, Insightful)
Please stop mangling my submissions. I did not submit to you the NYT article. I submitted the commentary to the NYT article which I wrote as a tech/public policy blogger reacting to the story. I find the way you guys now strip out submitters content and simply link to the "mainstream" article insulting and really makes me want to contribute to the discussions less and less. Why is my contribution less valuable than the NYT article? I think my commentary as an informed reader adds much to the discussion, and could have done quite a bit to improve the quality of comments here.
Is there a reason you no longer link to other people's submissions, only their mainstream media material?
I have been a Slashdot reader since 1998-1999. I read less and less. This is why. While I took the time to format, edit, and submit a story containing links to both the original NYT article and my own commentary [capitolvalley.net] you found it OK to strip out my entire submission and bury it in your worthless "firehose" and instead simply use me as a tip-off instead of a contributor to a community which I have been on for over ten years. Check my UID.
Is original (ie, not from "news sites") content no longer relevant on Slashdot? Hey Malda, Bates? Remember me? When did your site become a news aggregator instead of a place to discuss ideas, not just rehash articles from mainstream press? I don't feel like part of a community right now. I feel like I'm doing work just so someone else can take the credit. I spent a good amount of time writing that post that I linked you to, and you all but ignored it.
Why?
Andrew Feinberg
Angry Slashdot Veteran
Re:Stop mangling submissions. (Score:4, Insightful)
Hey, it proves they actually do edit the articles (sometimes).
As to your question of "why" - the answer is obvious - you aren't the original source. You're also not the story. The real story isn't "what Andrew Feinberg thinks about bloggers dropping dead", it's about bloggers dropping dead.
We've all (okay, many of us) submitted stuff and seen it mangled. Big deal. You didn't see me complain when they ran a copy of my poll [slashdot.org], stripped of my text,on the front page [slashdot.org]. And no, I didn't submit it - someone else must have. They didn't ask if they could use it (and it was 100% original, not a blog posting about an article someone else wrote), but I didn't go crying about it - I was glad to be able to contribute something people thought was worthwhile.
You want to ear respect? Don't whine. I remember one time when a print reporter misquoted something I said - it came out in print the exact opposite, and she remembered what I had really said (this was in the middle of an election campaign). She promised to print a retraction, and I said "Don't bother - if anyone asks, I said it, and it was just a stupid slip of the tongue." From that day on, I was gold.
People make mistakes. People have honest differences of opinion. Editors edit. Shit happens. You can always blog about it, if you feel the need to vent. Just stop with the whining - it comes across as very unprofessional, low uid notwithstanding.
Parent
Re:Telecommuting is good for business, and us. (Score:5, Interesting)
Just one minor nit to pick:
Part of the problem with many people working from home is it "doesn't feel like work", so they slack off. They work in their kitchen instead of a dedicated room / home office. They use the same computer for work and fun. They slack off on their personal appearance. Etc. Etc.
Getting dressed instead of sitting in your undies is part of the mental preparation for "Now I'm going to work!" I don't know how many times, when I was working from home, people would call and assume that I had all this "free time". I'd usually let them talk for a minute or two, but if it went longer, I'd tell them to call me at night - I'm working and don't want to "lose the momentum | thought | zone | whatever".
They'd be miffed the first few times.
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