The Washington Post’s arts and living section, Style, is looking for a blogger, an internal announcement reads. Whoever lands this position may want to invest in a serious coffee machine:
. . .
The job “will require early mornings to get a start on the day’s news and may sometimes require late nights covering awards shows and other live events,” the listing says. In a follow-up email, Washington Post Executive Editor Marty Baron explained that “there will be a lead blogger, but that blogger will not be responsible for all posts. The entire Style staff and others in our newsroom, will write posts. Some posts can be as short as a sentence or as simple as a link.”
Elizabeth Flock resigned from her blogging position at the Post last year after failing to credit another news outlet in an aggregated piece. Patrick Pexton, then the paper’s ombudsman, warned against the high-volume, low-oversight blogging she and other Post bloggers told him she was required to do. Post bloggers, he wrote, “said that they felt as if they were out there alone in digital land, under high pressure to get Web hits, with no training, little guidance or mentoring and sparse editing.”
That’s like grafting a McNugget to a chicken and waiting for the 20 count to come in. Sheesh…
This does get to a broader point — why hasn’t the MSM figured out that bloggers can be made to run in parallel to their organizations? Release the editorial hounds… but nab the commentary and comments?
A new age of letters? Perish the thought… but alas, the newspapers would rather perish themselves.
The reason why the MSM is dying isn’t because of their format. It’s because of their editors and their content.
