I’m often asked how I am able to work a full-time job during the day and run the now-nearly-full-time political blog (and contribute here). I don’t know how I do it, other than I am tired a lot of the time. I know I’m not the only one; I believe there are plenty of folks out there who need to step away from the keyboard for a while. The NYT has an interesting piece, In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop, on extreme blogger burnout, as in kicking the bucket. (h/t, Lev):
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.More below the fold…Of course, the bloggers can work elsewhere, and they profess a love of the nonstop action and perhaps the chance to create a global media outlet without a major up-front investment. At the same time, some are starting to wonder if something has gone very wrong. In the last few months, two among their ranks have died suddenly.
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.
…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.
OK, one big difference is I’m definitely not well-compensated for blogging; no one is paying me a salary or offering me benefits to allow me to even consider leaving my day job. In other ways my situation differs greatly from the bloggers mentioned in this article, perhaps not for the better. I have achieved a small measure of success in political blogworld, and with that, a pattern of new “job requirements” seems to have emerged —Some sites, like those owned by Gawker Media, give bloggers retainers and then bonuses for hitting benchmarks, like if the pages they write are viewed 100,000 times a month. Then the goal is raised, like a sales commission: write more, earn more.
Bloggers at some of the bigger sites say most writers earn about $30,000 a year starting out, and some can make as much as $70,000. A tireless few bloggers reach six figures, and some entrepreneurs in the field have built mini-empires on the Web that are generating hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. Others who are trying to turn blogging into a career say they can end up with just $1,000 a month.
* pressure for timeliness - need to comment or post on topics that are breaking;
* keep fresh content coming here and on the Blend - frequency of posts is a key to bring readers back;
* fulfilling requests to write original content and/or guest post at other blogs;
* travel to serve on panels or liveblog (I’m comped for travel arrangements on only a few events, so my ad revenues go to cover the rest);
* travel to conferences to network, do research and have access to interview subjects since I don’t live in DC or NY. Again, on my dime — and time, since I have to find time to take off of the day job.
Of course there is much personal satisfaction gained from the above, as I feel that I’m making a small contribution toward moving discussions about LGBT rights and race relations forward. But that’s paired with ongoing large-scale projects at work, managing staff, and keeping up with my day job deadlines, so I can definitely identify with the burnout, reduced resistance to catching colds and persistent insomnia (I had the latter problem long before blogging, it’s just worse now). Thankfully, I haven’t had to deal with weight gain(!); I’ve actually lost weight, though that may be due more to the damn late gall bladder than anything else.
One 22-year-old guy mentioned in the article who is paid to blog, sleeps only five hours a night, loves what he does, but pulls all nighters writing, and literally falls asleep at the computer. I have to cop to that last pathetic one. I remember sitting on the bed in a hotel where I was attending a conference and writing after a long day. My laptop was not plugged in, since I was only going to write up a couple of posts. Next thing I know I’m picking up my head — the computer had shut off from running out of juice, and my hands were still on the keyboard. Maybe 3-4 hours had gone by.
I wonder what the long-term consequence of this burning the candle at both ends is — I turn 45 this July, I certainly am not some 20-something computer jockey. At this point I have to laugh when people ask me when I’m going to write a book (as Amanda Panda and other bloggers have). Uhhh…and when would I have time to do that?!
By the way, Kate and I are getting away from it all next weekend, going to the mountains to a B&B. Not exactly long enough to recharge any batteries, but it will be nice not to think about the blog for 48 hours.
15 Responses to “Death by blogging?”
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I wonder if the Japanese will come up with a word for this, lke they have with working to death?
I’m entirely unsure what bloggers are making $30,000 a year doing this. I’m sure not.
I have no idea, Amanda. Must be the whole tech arena that is willing to pay bloggers. That hasn’t spilled over in a big way in politics. It may happen, but I wonder if progressives will be ahead of or behind the curve. The Republicans are certainly good at wingnut welfare.
I have enough trouble just reading Pandagon, and a very few other blogs!
I used to comment more prolifically because I used to work at a job where Net access was available to me in half-hour long chunks. And I browsed in the wee hours of the morning, when most everyone else (except our ANZAC, British, and European folks) was asleep, so I could catch up and then comment.
Since that job terminated–I’ve been pathetic.
Nowadays I download the posts and maybe get around to reading them hours, days, even weeks later.
The killer thing is that “timeliness.” Gazillions of times you or Amanda would write something brilliant, and right up my alley–but I found the thread cold and dead. This would typically happen in the middle of the week, which was the “weekend” of my old job (I worked Fri-Tues).
How much worse it is for you, who have the burden of maintaining the flame of this community.
And how much worse still for those guys who get, you know, paid for it–with benefits yet–but that salary etc is contingent on maintaining the product which is not just the posts themselves but their “timeliness.” No individual human being should have that kind of relentless, unending obligation. Being paid for it (aside from the question of whether the wage is liveable or not) is just a lure to self-destruction.
Darn it, both of you ought to be makng at least enough to pay rent/mortgage, power, and food bills out of what you do for us.
But CeilingCat forfend you get dependent on some corporate bureaucracy dangling incentives in front of you like catnip-laced food to get it.
Wow. I have an almost-full-time RL job, and a volunteer job which is creeping towards at least half-time helping to manage a large fandom roleplay project–and I’m getting stressed out. I know it isn’t anything like what you guys put up with, but even I feel like I’m going, going, going all the time. You and Kate definitely need the weekend off!
I don’t have any solutions–we all love our Internet lives and the good we do thereby too much to quit. But cutting back a bit for health might be smart, too….
Keep safe, you guys.
We 42-year-old computer jockeys worry about this, too. On the plus side I’m unemployed!
I wonder if the Japanese will come up with a word for this, lke they have with working to death?
KAROSHI
And there is this:
And, to round things off, from the Wikipedia:
The French-German TV Channel arte showed a documentary called “Alt in Japan” (Old in Japan) on 6 November 2006 dealing with old age workers in Japan. Many will be prepared to work unpaid overtime to an extreme extent particularly as their young co-workers will often quit when a job is too strenuous. In some cases it has been proven that firms were aware of the poor health of an employee. Some children will regularly pick their parents up from work to prevent them from working themselves to death.
Filial piety
Almost brings a tear to your eye, the way adversity brings in traditional Asian values………….
I wonder if the Japanese will come up with a word for this, lke they have with working to death?
KAROSHI
And there is this:
And, to round things off, from the Wikipedia:
The French-German TV Channel arte showed a documentary called “Alt in Japan” (Old in Japan) on 6 November 2006 dealing with old age workers in Japan. Many will be prepared to work unpaid overtime to an extreme extent particularly as their young co-workers will often quit when a job is too strenuous. In some cases it has been proven that firms were aware of the poor health of an employee. Some children will regularly pick their parents up from work to prevent them from working themselves to death.
Filial piety
Almost brings a tear to your eye, the way adversity brings in traditional Asian values………….
hmm, looks like the article has struck a nerve in the on-line world…we seem to have an effort afoot to avoid commenting oneself to death.
It’s interesting to read something like this and compare it to predictions about the impact of computers on society and the economy. There was a common idea that computers would create more leisure time for people because they could be used to do a lot of repetitive tasks. But rather than slowing down our lives, computers have actually accelerated them. Computers haven’t been adapted to our lives; rather we’ve adapted to computers, it seems.
Don’t most people on the planet “work themselves to death”?
Only the tiniest minority of people are ever actually able to retire. Even in the so-called developed world.
And yet the companies that broker the ads and rent the pipes seem to be doing rather nicely. Surplus value, anyone?
I watched something similar happen in the monthly-magazine business through the emergence of fedex, then fax, then email. With each new way of getting stuff back and forth between writer and editor, deadlines shifted, the expected time for turning something around shortened, the number of iterations increased, the pressure went up, and the visible quality did not improve, to put it mildly.
It’s not so much computers that we’ve been adapting ourselves to as corporations — things with the rights of people, but no need to sleep, eat or go to the bathroom. And ever-more-pervasive communications technologies have done it. (Does anyone remember when having the latest beeper/phone/blackberry/whatever was considered a sign of status rather than a sign of 24-hour peonage?)
Nobody posted this yet?
http://xkcd.com/369/
Most of the $30 grand/yr salaried bloggers are paid to watch and wait, as much as to blog.
The bread and butter of most Gawker sites is a rapid stream of punchy commentary about news as it breaks through other outlets.
That kind of blogging can be very time consuming. I did filter blogging for AlterNet’s PEEK on Thursdays, so I can attest. The PEEK is a “best of” the liberal blogs. Maybe you only write 600 original words per day, but you spend an incredible amount of time keeping your finger on the pulse. And coming up with witty headlines, etc.
These filter bloggers have to keep up with a huge volume of media and churn out posts at regular intervals throughout the day. They probably scan 20 or 30 news items for every item they actually post. It’s hard to get any other revenue-generating work done with this kind of divided attention.
Recently, Gawker changed its pay scheme to reward longer posts with more in-depth reporting–rewarding contributors by the number of clickthroughs to their story, as opposed to the number of posts, although they still have to meet a monthly post quota. I don’t know how these writers are going to fit in additional reporting. The real problem, I suspect, was that folks would churn out quickie posts to meet their quota and punch.
Now, Gawker’s gone deeper into the piecework model so that the bloggers will be tied to the screens all day, competing against each other for clickthroughs from the homepage, searching for that perfect item that will make them money.
I am fortunate enough to be able to (usually) check on my site while at work — and since I work 0630 to 1700, that’s a big part of the day.
Probably my biggest advantage is that I’ve always been able to write the finished copy the first time, from college term papers to blogging; it’s rare for me to have to do much revision (other than spell-checking, since my speling is absolutely lousy). Falling asleep at the computer isn’t a problem for me.