Bullshit. Classic piece of sensationalized make-news on the front page this morning.
Synopsis.: Two bloggers died recently and one had a heart attack due to the always-on nature, every-minute-is-a-deadline world of blogging.
First off, as Dan Warner, the nasty editor in chief of the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune told a roomful of rebellious reporters (myself included) in 1984: “You want stress? I’ll show you stress. Go work in air traffic control or be a single mother on food stamps.” (He then turned the room over to a “stress consultant” who told us to close our eyes and relax our muscles beginning at our toes, moving up to the follicles of our hair).
I know and knew two of the bloggers in Richtel’s piece. Om Malik is a good friend to me, but not to the gym. The fact the guy had a heart attack earlier this year is not because he ignored the surgeon general’s warning on the side of his blog: GigaOm. Marc Orchant died in December. I knew Marc from our work with Foldera, the SaaS collaboration play. Did his blog do him in? Did it contribute to his untimely death at 50? Cmon.
And Arrington gains 30 pounds. Welcome to the club. I packed on an extra 25 in the last year myself and it was more due to being a fat ass without a bicycle than anything else.
And so some Gizmodo bloggers fall asleep at their desks. Every afternoon half of America’s office rats nod off in meetings about next month’s meeting about the TPS report meeting after they get around a Bacon Lover’s Triple-Pounder and a supersized fries at lunch.
If the point is that life is one constant deadline, okay, I’ll buy that. But this blog-as-sweatshop meme that has been percolating around the Gawker/Forbes.com world of Manhattan indentured 20-something servitude for the last five years is the same crap fact checkers went through in the magazine world in the 1980s: long hours, party till you drop, and nutrition via ramen.
Does anyone care anymore who got it first?
