This NY Times story about professional blogging being (shock) hard, intense and often stressful work was predictably panned. Yes it was silly to draw conclusions from 2 sudden deaths – but the author does actually point out that it’s not epidemiologically sound. Do they have to spell it out?
I think we’d be missing out if no-one every wrote a news story, blog post, comment, or status update that just pondered some question with nothing but very poor circumstantial evidence.
Ok, this story does show the limitations of conventional news structure – but it also shows the knee-jerkiness of much of the blogosphere. If it had been written as a blog post, eg:
‘A few bloggers have had heart attacks recently. Is it because they/we work too hard? Why is that? How do the emerging pay-per-post/pay-per-cpm models affect that?’
..then no doubt it wouldn’t have been so criticised (the only good criticism I read was by Felix Salmon, who pointed out that although timeliness is important, breaking news by seconds doesn’t actually cut it in the blogosphere – or, perhaps, online generally).
The news story structure is kind of limiting in that it forces one to have a ‘top line’ and creates the expectation that anything said in that top line should be thoroughly backed up.
I believe the conventional news story structure is too limiting for many things that could legitimately be considered ‘news’ or information. But what role do our expectations as readers play? Can’t we countenance an MSM story that is merely ponderous and poses an inconslusive question? Ironically if it’d been written as a blog post it wouldn’t need any more evidence or weighty argument – it would just need to be worded slightly differently.
It would still have the flaws that Felix Salmon pointed out – but it wouldn’t make everyone so darn angry.
storymachine 