Leslie of Leslie’s Omnibus posted about a Chicago Trib columnist (Amy Dickinson) who bashed blogs in a recent column. (Go here for a free Bug Me Not login if you’re not registered with the Trib)
Ironically enough, I just got a letter from a concerned reader with her OWN tale of woe that shares some striking parallels with the Dickinson missive (you may want to read the Trib column first so that you can see the similarities).
I’ve posted it below, along with my response.

My on-and-off boyfriend of three years started registering for and logging in to chicagotribune.com about five months ago.
He is in a band, so the whole idea made sense to me for networking and promoting his band. Then, all of a sudden, chicagotribune.com took over his life and he started waking up immediately to log on. He had a slew of factually-inaccurate articles & extreme left-wing columns he read all day.
He read this one woman who wrote every thought that entered her head and every conversation she had into a column — and I was able to follow and track the progress of her increasingly bile-filled political bias — because it was all publicly posted.
Of course, he and I are no longer seeing each other because I was devastated by the number and the depth of the lies which were fed to him by this woman — each time she lied, HE would end up repeating what she had said in her many columns. Most important, I was unhappy with who I had become — this insane voyeur logging onto chicagotribune.com each day to check up on why my boyfriend had become a frothing, Bush-hating, liberal moonbat.
This woman provided details about conversations with “anonymous sources”, details about secret National Security Agency programs, insensitive cartoons about wounded soldiers — even exploitable details about the vulnerabilities of America’s transportation infrastructure — things that I am sure people never expected posted on the Web. I worry that, since chicagotribune.com has no conscience, they will sell my personal information to porn-spammers. What do you think of this?
Signed,
Tribulated

Dear Tribulated,
For people who don’t know, chicagotribune.com is an online “newspaper” of other people’s photos and life stories, where “journalists”, build “readerships” and write “columns” to while away their sad and empty days. (A “newspaper” is large sheets of paper covered with words — sort of like a CNN transcript.) According to one recent estimate, there are more than 70 million newspapers being printed around the world.
As your letter points out, the virtues of life at a newspaper are also its deficits. People can easily meet and develop working relationships, but the problem with developing relationships with strangers is that strangers have no reason to respect your privacy — they have no qualms about exposing you for misquoting or even completely making up sources. Your story is yet another reason why life as a columnist has become not only messy but also so boring. People who live a journalist’s life don’t have actual experiences. Their stories tend to reflect that.
I can’t understand why people are so hungry to share their every waking thought with the rest of the world — and I certainly don’t understand why people are interested in reading these musings, personal details and outright lies.
Maybe you should try reading blogs, instead.