Print journalism was once a reliable career path for the heroines of so-called chick lit. We had Carrie Bradshaw, who got her start as a columnist in Candace Bushnell’s pages; Andrea Sachs, Lauren Weisberger’s Vogue serf; and Becky Bloomwood, aka Shopaholic, ironically employed at a personal finance magazine. Jennifer Weiner gave us Cannie Shapiro, feisty entertainment reporter; Jane Green gave us Jemima J., somewhat less feisty, still working at a newspaper. The authors inventing these heroines had often worked as journalists themselves. They knew what they were talking about; they had stories to tell.

Print journalism promised excitement (colorful characters, a dash of creativity) but also reassuring stability—a place where women could clock in for manageable daily adventures then clock out for afterhours drama. But as print journalism has become a decreasingly reliable real-world profession, a new brand of chick lit has emerged. It is set against a somewhat less glamorous backdrop: the blogosphere.

From Jessica Grose, formerly of Jezebel and Slate, comes Sad Desk Salad, about a Brooklynite named Alex Lyons who writes for a women’s site called Chick Habit. Karin Tanabe, formerly of Politico’s Click blog, will soon publish The List, about a D.C. native named Adrienne Brown who writes for a political outlet called the Capitolist. Then there’s Janis Thomas’s heroine in Something New, a suburban mom unhappily staring down her forty-third birthday when she stumbles into blogging. Sad Desk Salad and The List both bear blurbs comparing them to The Devil Wears Prada, but they suggest a distinct breed, one with fewer expense accounts and more page-view panic. Gone are the celebrity encounters and expensive accessories. Now there are coworkers who communicate solely by IM and smartphones that must remain perpetually aglow. But if new media chick lit presents a version of journalism that’s decidedly bleaker, there’s a surprising new romance to the genre as well: the romance of work.

In Sad Desk Salad, Grose offers an affectionate send-up of the slovenly-blogger stereotype, creating a quick-witted heroine who lusts after egg sandwiches and takes comfort in an extravagantly stinky muumuu. Alex Lyons, Grose’s protagonist, is a Wesleyan graduate who won college prizes for advocacy journalism, then worked at a music website after graduation. Now she wakes at 6:20 in the morning to read RSS feeds on her couch and churns out ten posts a day. Her routine is derailed when a mysterious reader starts a “hate blog”—and, around the same time, an anonymous tipster sends in a video of a parenting guru’s college-age daughter snorting coke. Over the course of one tightly paced work week, Alex swallows her scruples, posts the video, and unravels the hate-blogger mystery, weathering the personal and professional fallout for both. In the end, things work out fine for her. When we leave Alex, she’s accepted a job as online editor at a glossy magazine, where her new boss immediately asks if she’s got anything like that coke video in the hopper.

The sadistic scheduling of online news becomes a kind of fetish.

Grose’s new media heroine may be ambivalent about the moral defensibility of her work, but Tanabe’s (for the most part) is not. Adrienne Brown, protagonist of The List, has spent a few years post-Wellesley living in Manhattan, dating bankers, and covering society for Town & Country. At 28, she decides that the time has come to conquer political journalism by working at the Capitolist—a “new-media empire” that promises meteoric ascent to the young “geniuses” who toil in its “sweatshop”/newsroom. Still proudly clad in her “so not Washington” wardrobe, Adrienne moves back in with her parents to write for the Capitolist’s Style section. The shadow of old media looms large: long ago, her mother worked as a D.C. gossip columnist, which meant carousing lavishly and smoking lots of pot. Adrienne, however, must answer all email messages within three minutes, starting at 5 a.m. Acting on little more than a hunch, Adrienne sets out to pursue what she deems a career-making scoop—an affair between a young journalist (her colleague) and a senator. She rents a camera with a telephoto lens and wriggles commando-style through the woods outside the hotel where she’s spotted them. Her suspicions are vindicated. She sits on the story, does the requisite legwork—filing hourly Style posts from her Blackberry all the while—but finally rides her sex pix to professional glory.