Blogging for the Washington Post probably isn’t that bad. Still, the Post‘s ombudsman, Patrick Pexton, felt the paper deserved a spanking after the recent resignation of BlogPost blogger Elizabeth Flock. In his opinion piece regarding Ms. Flock’s resignation following what amounted to a (minor and perhaps unintended) plagiarism scandal, Mr. Pexton detailed the unrealistic demands made on young journalists who find themselves fielding blogging duties at a major newspaper. He noted BlogPost was expected to garner up to 2 million hits a month, with Ms. Flock publishing 5-6 posts a day. She wasn’t writing simple paragraphs hitting major points in a story either, but full-on 500-word pieces aggregated from multiple sources.
Traffic expectations and heavy workload contributed to Ms. Flock’s two mistakes, which included re-writing a Discovery News post without crediting the source, the incident that led to her resignation. “[Ms. Flock] said it was only a matter of time before she made a third one; the pressures were just too great,” wrote Mr. Pexton.
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