Need a break? My impending vacation next week coincidentally coincided with a New York Times article about overworked writers and the health problems they face.
Personally, my day has been stretched thinner and thinner by blogging--but it gives me the chance to do fun, new stuff like this web video. As I stumbled towards the vacation finish line this weekend, I have to confess I sympathized with the suffering writers and obsessed over this slashdot thread where various professionals debated the economics of freelance blogging.
The blog-baiting story has already been commented on by nearly every single journalism blog on the Internets, but it has spawned some great quotes. Case in point, novelist John Scalzi on the life of an unprofitable blogger: "I like not having to intellectually humiliate myself online for page views. When I intellectually humiliate myself online, it’s for the pure pleasure of it."
Then, this morning, Portfolio's Jeff Bercovici woke me up with this quote. What do you think? Are web-based writers whiners or victims? I am about to go on vacation, so I disqualify myself from having any fair opinion. Dig it:
"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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