Published today in Crikey’s subscriber email:
Bolt’s blog: why the apologies will continue
No matter what you think about the man’s work, there’s no denying that Andrew Bolt writes an extraordinarily successful blog that boasts “more than one million hits a month” and “as many as 13,000 comments in a week”. There is no doubt that it’s one of the biggest — if not the biggest — blog in the country in terms of readership and participation. The effort that must be required to manually moderate every single reader comment is mindboggling, and it sounds like Bolt does a decent share of it himself (“more than 10 hours of every choked week”).
Genuinely, I dips me lid. However, as Bolt discovered this week, if a single comment is approved that causes immeasurable hurt to one person (especially if that person is a prominent journalist and opponent of the blogger), there will probably be trouble.
Bolt had the nerve to complain about Hungry Beast taking material from just one post. the reality is, they could have taken exactly the same sort of material from hundreds of Bolt’s posts.
I’m not buying the “too hard to moderate, and I’m sorry the occasional ugly comment got through”.
Bolt was back again today …
{Edited to prevent immeasurable hurt — Scott}
Nice to see you getting published. Love the new digs. I hope you still have Grods archived however because there’s some fcking gold in them thar e-hill.