A thing which I only came to realize recently is just how little reader feedback most reporters get, even post Al Gore's benevolent gift of the internet. Even reporters/columnists/etc who prominently display their emails get very little reader feedback. I was quite stunned to realize that the amount of reader feedback most reporters get - even now - is about the amount I was getting after I'd only been running this lemonade stand for a couple of months. Bloggers get a huge amount of feedback relative to their readership size, both in comments and in email, and I was shocked to realize that this wasn't something most print journalists experienced.
That's why Stoller's assertion to little Debbie, "nothing happened to you," is actually probably more meaningful than most people realize. Getting shitloads of nasty feedback when you get something wrong is, actually, "nothing." It's just another day as a blogger. I've always thought the whole "self correcting blogosphere" nonsense was just that, nonsense. Especially with all the mostly-conservative blogs which don't have comments public correction requires that they actually, you know, correct themselves. But nonetheless everybody deals with the feedback, and anyone with even a modest amount of traffic deals with quite a lot of it.
Boo hoo. People were mean. Welcome to my world.
