Negative News

Today I was reading a post about a school asking a teacher to stop pushing blogs and wikis in his school and remembered the tale of the blogger who was fired from her job as an airline attendant for writing a semi-fictional account of her life in the sky and all of the bad news about e-voting machines and such. I was thinking about why all of these accounts tend to be negative, when I had an epiphany - it wouldn't be news if it weren't!

I think there is a natural tendency in blogs to report on the outrageous because bloggers do what they do out of a passion for it, and it's natural to become passionately engaged in defending something you see as an injustice. The "things are just peachy" entries (which are probably rarer to begin with) tend to get ignored by the blogging community. Who but "the man" would blog about how great working for some company is?