I might as well just wear a kilt for a living

Sometime while either mowing the lawn or trying on a kilt this weekend, I had a revelation.

Sure, I like blogging. It's like talking to myself, but in a way that makes you me seem less nuts. Sort of. But it is what blogging has meant for me and my fellow scribes that has me worried.

Newspapers, in large part to the Internet (especially the seemingly benign yet actually Satanic Craig Newmark of Craigslist fame) - and their own failure to figure out a new business model - are on falling into the tar pits like West Coast dinosaurs.

They are all trying to go multimedia, building Web pages with all sorts of bells and whistles - audio, video, message boards - essentially everything but porn. But give it time.

What this has meant for journalists is more and more typing for stagnant pay - the workload increased not only because of depleted staffs but because many are now required to keep blogs.

Which means you are almost literally tethered to your laptop. How you are supposed to find time to actually develop any story - well, who has time for that anymore? Instant news, just add water.

And let's be honest. Nobody should have that much to say/write about in one day. It's as if the model is my Mom - who can talk your ear off when she is in the mood, giving you all the details, down to the number of buttons on the dresses worn by the bridesmaids at my oldest cousin's wedding. My Mom, crossed with those blowhard pundits on cable and radio and the Net who say stupid things all the time in part because they have no time to think, and in many cases thinking would just make their empty heads explode.

I imagine the weekend I just had would have been a lot less fun if I would have had to give instant updates to a virtual features desk. I'd try on the kilt at the Highland Games, then have to post a picture, then write about what it felt like to have a breeze blowing up my yahoo. Then I would spill expensive Scotch on my PDA - right after I set up an online poll about if I should buy the all black kilt or the Hamilton gray one.

At the Taste of Randolph Street, I would have had to sample foods and make video of all the dopes who brought their dogs to a crowded fest.Do canines enjoy the country-tinged college rock of the Drive-By Truckers? Or are they secretly hoping to break into the Amish Chicken Products office off Lake Street on the way home? And who the hell buys a Great Dane and lives in the heart of a big city?

Of course, I would have to make this all "cute" because the marketing department tells us at stories about cute dogs will get hits for the Web site. Or I could have opted for the fear factor - as in, "How afraid of these dogs should you be?" or "How safe is your pet at a street fair? Could Fido get food poisoning?"

All of which has been a meandering way to make this point: Who the hell has time to look up stories about doggies at festivals online? Who has the time to look up any of this extra super bonus content?

People tell us they don't have time to look at an actual newspaper anymore, but here we go, putting even more sentences out into the world, but on the Internet.

What people do seem to have time for, apparently, is screwing off at work. When else are they doing all this surfing? Over dinner? In the car? At the kid's soccer practice?

Nah, between spread sheets and memos come incessant peeks at e-mail, shopping, looking for dates, Facebooks, trivia quizzes, iTunes, YouTube videos and job searches. We're hoping people might just take a look at the news, even beyond what the Google, Yahoo, AOL and Comcast pages are offering. I mean, we have cool videos, too - just like YouTube and all that implies.

So my job now is to encourage you to be less productive at your job so that I can still have a job. Either way, we're all spending way too much time staring at computer screens.