'NYT' Lament: Will No One Think of the Bloggers?

My wife is a physician. Like all physicians, she completed a grueling one-year internship following graduation from medical school, during which period she routinely worked 90-hour weeks, made life-or-death treatment decisions after 24 straight hours on her feet, and faced constant risk of exposure to HIV, drug-resistant tuberculosis and other deadly diseases.

A friend of ours, my former college roommate, was a special-ops commando in the Israeli military. In training exercises, he hiked 70 kilometers through the desert, carrying more than 50 pounds of gear, until the skin blistered off his feet in sheets. He was serving when the second intifada broke out, and during the Lebanon war, and, although he's not allowed to say exactly what his unit does, you can be sure it's not the sort of thing that enhances one's life expectancy.

I thought of my wife and our friend while reading today's insipid New York Times story about the dangers facing professional bloggers. It may not be the stupidest article the Times has ever published, but it's certainly the stupidest thing I've ever seen on page one, or anywhere outside of the Styles section, for that matter.

To dismiss it as merely a "dog bites man" story is to dramatically understate the newsworthiness of canine attacks. Extrapolating wildly from the actuarially-unremarkable deaths of two middle-aged men -- out of a workforce of "several thousand and maybe even tens of thousands" -- here are some of the observations it attempts to pass off not only as news but as news that's somehow unique to the blogging business:

-Spending all day in front of a computer can lead to weight gain and other physical problems.

-New technologies make it increasingly difficult to leave work at the office.

-Information economy workers feel pressured to extend their working hours into nights and weekends.

-Some such workers consider themselves undercompensated.

And so on. What's coal miner's lung compared to laptop neck and Blackberry thumb?

It's a frequent lament of journalism purists that today's relatively well-paid, over-educated journalists have become a professional class unto themselves, increasingly obsessed with the habits and opinions and gripes of their peers and indifferent to the rest of the world around them. It's that type of insularity that might lead a newspaper reporter, say, to accept at face value claims by a few fellow writers that their occupation is a singularly demanding one in a world of doctors, soldiers, air-traffic controllers, special-ed teachers and millions upon millions of sleep-deprived, time-stressed desk jockeys whose plight, alas, goes unlamented on the front page of the most widely-circulated edition of the world's most important newspaper.

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