Fresh off its finger-on-the-pulse report two weeks ago about “students with everything going for them engaging in orgy lite,” as one irate reader described New York’s magazine’s recent cover story about “ambisexual heteroflexible teens” at a prestigious New York City high school, the magazine delivers again this week with another zeitgeisty must-read on …”The Blog Establishment.”

Yes, we know, we know, “2003 called and it wants its trend story back.” (New York’s use of the phrase “player-hater” in the piece does not help its case for timeliness). But wait. Hold the eye roll. You may just learn a thing or two here.

Has it ever occurred to you, for example, that “a blog is like a shark: If it stops moving, it dies. Without fresh postings every day — hell, every few minutes — even the most well-linked blog will quickly lose its audience”? That’s right. A blogger’s work is never done — and it is, for the most part, rather thankless work since, as writer Clive Thompson explains, “most bloggers toil in total obscurity” and rarely get paid more than “journalist wages.” And yet, Thompson declares in his next-to-last sentence, “the age of the blog moguls is here.” The proof, apparently, is one Peter Rojas, editor of the blog Engadget and “the best compensated blogger in history” (thanks to AOL paying $25 million for the company that owns his blog), who lives —just as you might expect — in a “bachelor pad on the Lower East Side” complete with Ikea desk.

One thing we didn’t expect to happen upon in Thompson’s piece was a contender for our ongoing Best Anonymous Source competition. It seems that bloggers (like politicians) prefer to do their back-biting off-the-record and Thompson (like Washington reporters)...

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