An interesting piece on pro-blogging appeared in the New York Times, In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop :
They work long hours, often to exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece — not garments, but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop. You may know it by a different name: home.
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.
…. It is unclear how many people blog for pay, but there are surely several thousand and maybe even tens of thousands…
…. the evolution of the “pay-per-click” economy has put the emphasis on reader traffic and financial return, not journalism.
Blogging as a profession puts severe stress on the problogger because there is no such thing as deadline — any hour, any minute is “posting time”. Unlike the newspaper journalists, “pay-per-click” bloggers are in constant pressure to be updated and to be ready to post anytime of the day.
But for the New York Times to blame these deaths on blogging is a little bit stretching the truth. It is called “sensationalism.”
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