Just in case you were wondering - no! d i g i t a l m i s s i v e has not gone into hibernation or is contemplating early retirement. Far from it actually. 

It’s just we’ve all been rather busy with jobs, projects, plus some vacation time here and there, which has caused us to post less than we have since we started this blog in August of last year.

Which brings me to the topic of my (long overdue) post: What happens if a blogger doesn’t blog each and every day?  In this increasingly “always on” 24/7 news and information world of ours, am I expect to churn out posts no matter what?

And if so, what does that do to the quality of my writing?

Wouldn’t you deserve whatever best I can come up with, rather than my “spitting out” posts just for the sake of continuity? 

Turns out, qualitative, substantive writing isn’t exactly experiencing major upswing.

We are living in a media environment where traditional publishers (think New York Times et al) can barely keep quality journalism a profitable business model. Most other traditional dailies (for that matter, the print news industry as a whole), face similar systemic problems. And it’s not yet entirely clear if and how to remedy the situation short of re-inventing paper-based news publishing from scratch.   

On the other end of the equation sits microblogging star Twitter and other similar short messaging services, by now affording millions of individuals their daily real-time feeds of (mostly) user-published commentary. This, of course, is a different “news animal” all together. After all, no matter how common or profane, these text bites come to you instantly and for free, purposely unfiltered and unchecked. Unlike for-profit published news, microblogging is what you make it. Use at your own risk.

Maybe blogs such as d i g i t a l m i s s i v e and its multitude of peers are tasked to fill exactly the very growing gap between professionally produced substantive and user-generated situational publishing, in the process building what sits right in between the seemingly diametrically opposed “old world” New York Times and “new world” Twitter model.

This gives me hope as it means the blogosphere is not a fad, as some have argued, but instead is an increasingly viable information source often striving to emulate the New York Times, never quite close to the speed of Twitter.

This leaves at least one more question: How much time does a pausing blogger like myself get until you vanish and move on for good?

In this world of instant, self-directed information publishing, probably not too much.

So please bear with me.

Cut me some slack.

We bloggers have day-time jobs too, you know