Does blogging kill? Or is that just a killer story?

Larry Dignan at ZDNet.com fires a salvo at NYT writer Matt Richtel's front-pager on how too much blogging can be fatal. Richtel used a trio of examples — two deaths and a heart attack — along with anecdotes of bloggers who pass out on their keyboards, dump protein packets into their coffee, and face deadline pressure so extreme that it amounts to a sort of "torture."

Dignan takes exception with the premise on two counts. First, extreme blogging can certainly cause the kind of stress that can harm your health and decrease quality of life. "But is it any worse than being a corporate lawyer?" he asks. "How many of those folks dropped in the last six months? How about mortgage brokers? Hedge fund traders? FBI agents?"

Dignan's second assault on Richtel's piece is more personal, and even more compelling. Richtel, he writes, actually interviewed him for the piece, but Dignan theorizes that because he didn't fit the profile of a blogger with a death wish, he didn't make the article's final cut:

Matt’s money question was this: Give me the anatomy of your day? I told him it varies, but I said the first thing I do in the morning is work out. To do this gig you need stamina and that means you need to be in some sort of shape.

Probably the unfortunate part about the NYT piece was that it focused on the deaths, rather than the stress. My guess is that you will not see the word "blogging" appear on any death certificates in the near future, and that reducing a cardiac death to one cause — even if it is a contributor — is somewhere between silly and lazy.

No one's arguing that blogging can be extremely stressful, or that extreme stress coupled with poor health can kill you. But there's a logical leap in the middle there that Richtel's story didn't quite have the legs to make.