“There is no vision beyond page views,” Gawker media reporter Richard Morgan has said about Gawker managing editor Nick Denton to New York‘s “Intelligencer” after quitting at the end of his first day. “I was announced as being some kind of television beat writer. And I spent the day reading TV blogs and e-mailing and calling and meeting with TV folks. And Nick would tell me to post, like, something about Us Weekly getting Ashlee Simpson‘s engagement wrong. And then he wanted me to do another on Playgirl. Jesus spent three days in Hell. I could only handle one.”
But that’s the blogging game, man! You can research and interview and write your pieces, but in the meantime you have to post stuff and you have to keep it going all day and sometimes into the night. If you stop shovelling coal into the steam engine the train will slow down and stop and then you’re dead meat. The effort can be hellish, yes, but the game is the game, man, and if you can’t grim up and get down and ignore nearly everything else in your life (including doing the laundry, renewing your car registration and going to the post office) in order to keep focused and keep shovelling then you don’t belong. If you don’t come in on Saturday, don’t bother coming in on Sunday.