Blogging kills

Bloggers’ hearts are giving out under the strain of chasing stuff that’s already been reported.

In other words, geezer journos are playing a game meant for young people.

I turned 41 on April 1. So imagine the pang I felt in my chest when I read that tech blogger Om Malik nearly croaked at the same age last December. (Malik’s Wordpress avatar has him chomping on a cigar. I am a former cigar and pipe smoker myself.)

And just yesterday, I ran into a friend, a veteran newspaper editor, who sees–somewhat perversely–an “opening” for himself as a blogger.

Here’s what my friend said: Young journalists are not interested in blogging. They are after the trends. They want to write the “big picture” stories. That’s where he steps in (hand to heart, staggering, with a nitroglycerin tablet under his tongue.) He can break stories as a blogger!

In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop – New York Times
Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style.

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