Blogging yourself to death

The New York Times, in one of its classic "trend stories," reports today on the phenomenon of bloggers blogging themselves to death.

Hmmm.

One of my favorite educational bloggers, Mindy McAdams of the University of Florida, blogged on Friday about the way in which groups aligned with traditional media tend to overlook the positives associated with Web journalism.

(I believe she survived that post and is still alive.)

It's certainly true that the mainstream media have a financial interest in minimizing and marginalizing independent Internet publishers. For example the CEO of craigslist complained last year about the way his site is covered.

Q: How do you feel about your own media coverage? I see that Craigslist often gets reported on as the de facto way of picking up prostitutes.

JIM: We’ve been hearing increasingly from newspaper reporters who confide that they are only allowed to write negative stories about Craigslist these days, because we’re viewed as competition by their newspaper’s business managers. And, obviously, sex sells papers, more so than stories about finding a used couch, so while we do follow our media coverage, most of our attention is devoted to direct feedback from our users.

Too much of anything can be a bad thing, and I'm sure the same is true of blogging. It is really easy to start and really, really hard to do well over a sustained period of time.

The only thing I'm (pretty) sure of is that we are still too new to this Internet thing to see where it's all going to end up.

This death-by-blogging trend makes me wonder if Gannett will have to rethink its plans for new Web sites for all its papers. As described here, one of the things the Northwestern will soon allow you to do is create your own blog on its site.

Will Gannett be legally liable for the death of one of its public bloggers?

Inquiring minds will want to know.