Have you ever read a post or two that has made you want to tear your hair out, scream “Bloody Murder” and strangle the genius who actually thought this was a good post to write? Or, is it just me?
Anyway, thanks to a few tweets, I had the misfortune of clicking on an op-ed piece from a young journalist on the Huffington Post’s site. Personal feelings aside, and why I think this 22-year-old needs to be slapped upside the head a few times and given a serious dose of reality. This is an op-ed piece and she is entitled to her opinion. However, unpopular and naive it may be.
That’s enough about that. I’ll leave that argument aside to the thousands of HuffPost commenters, who have very strong opinions on this story.
I have a much bigger problem. It’s not about the story she wrote, or for whatever ungodly reason that despite being fictional characters, she only looked up to Carrie Bradshaw and Harriet The Spy as female journalists growing up. My problem is how she handled the situation online (especially on Twitter) after it went live. For instance, she actually had the audacity- or maybe just plain naive- to post this tweet.
In this article, she claims she is a journalist and a writer. However, true professional journalists are supposed to uncover the truth, and tell stories about what’s happening in their community. While they sometimes creates controversy, they are supposed to base their stories off facts and observations they encounter while out in their communities. This should go for everything from articles to op-ed columns. It needs to have some meat and substance to the piece.
While this is just an opinion piece, this post just creates controversy and backlash for the sake of it. There is argurably no real meat or substance this post. She merely comes across as an attention whore writing a “woe is my life” “sensational” piece.
This isn’t just a problem with just this HuffPost piece. It’s a problem that a lot of bloggers struggle with. They become attention whores and create controversial posts just because they know it will get lots of buzz. They crave the “look at me, look at me, look at me!” attention, that these posts provide, no matter how unflattering the post paints them. For example on a smaller scale, we can look no further than the slew of dying/dead posts on PR/Marketing blogs. First email is dying, then press releases are dead, and the list goes on and on.
As for the HuffPost blogger, who is clearly an attention whore, she will ironically be facing an uphill battle with a lot of struggles, kind of ironic since she claimed that her life didn’t have any struggles before.
What’s your take on this issue? Please weigh in the comments section.
