There’s a certain type of news story that ought to be called “link catnip” — because it appears to have been designed to garner the maximum number of links on blogs around the world. Such was the case with Sunday’s alarmist tale in the New York Times, “In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop.” It appears one blogger had a heart attack, while another had chest pains. A third says he’ll be having a nervous breakdown pretty soon. This is, the piece’s author says breathlessly, “the age of the digital sweatshop.”

To say this is ridiculous is to do an injustice to the word “ridiculous.” Journalists — and the bloggers highlighted by the piece are basically old-time deadline journalists in Internet form — have always functioned at high speeds, working to get a story first. It used to be that much of the stress was about getting the piece into the paper — writing on a pad, finding a pay phone, phoning notes into a copy boy so that a rewrite man on the desk could flesh it out into a story that could appear in the next edition. This was not something they whined about. It was something they were proud of, and they didn’t think it was particularly hard work, maybe because for most of this century reporters came from the working class and their relatives worked in industrial plants or coal mines, doing hard labor in professions that really did threaten to shorten their lives.

The fact that bloggers find themselves unable to stop blogging day and night really has less to do with the commercial demands of the medium than it does to the heightened experience of life lived on the Internet. Because it is possible to write a blog item and have it appear instantaneously, many bloggers presume that an item is fresh only to the extent that it conceived, fleshed out, and posted — and that no one will find their blogs of value unless they are sitting at their desks constantly, always at the ready to file. This is not only a source of stress, but a source of fun. It’s fun to be able to be among the first people on earth to issue forth a comment about a news event. People are doing this for a living not because they can’t find something else to do, but because there is nothing else they would rather do. The sniveling about it is repugnant.