Blog 'til you drop (dead)

Those who blog will know that it is time consuming running a blog. I blog outside of study, work and family commitments and get around five to six hours sleep a night.

Some aren't so lucky. The New York Times explores the ugly side of professional blogging. Some bloggers, like Matt Buchanan (pictured) work long hours often to exhaustion. The more clicks his blog posts get, the more money he gets. The more posts he does, the greater the chance of getting more clicks. This is the digital-era sweatshop. You may know it by a different name: home.

Buchanan lives in a small apartment in Brooklyn, where his bedroom doubles as his office. He works for clicks for Gizmodo, a popular Gawker Media site that publishes news about gadgets. He says he sleeps about five hours a night and often does not have time to eat proper meals. But he does stay fueled — by regularly consuming a protein supplement mixed into coffee.

“The fact I have a few thousand people a day reading what I write — that’s kind of cool,” he said. And, yes, it is exhausting. Sometimes, he said, “I just want to lie down.” Sometimes he does rest, inadvertently, falling asleep at the computer.

“If I don’t hear from him, I’ll think: Matt’s passed out again,” said Brian Lam, the editor of Gizmodo. “It’s happened four or five times.”

The article continues on to report on two exhausted bloggers who dropped dead.