Wednesday, May 14, 2008

UNHAPPY TRAILS: A melancholy farewell as Tony Kornheiser, first and foremost a "newspaper guy," has accepted a buyout from the Washington Post after 29 years of journalism there. Quoth the Bald Brother:

There was not enough wine in the world, there wasn't, not last night. I'm watching 'Idol,' and I'm thinking about all these things, and I don't know who I'm supposed to talk to about this....It just feels odd. It feels odd and it feels bad. It doesn't feel sad, there's no sadness to it, it just feels wrong.
Thank goodness Kornheiser has other platforms and paychecks to follow, but too many good, experienced journalists are being pushed towards the door in D.C., Philadelphia and elsewhere by publishers who have not figured out how to adapt their business structures to the online, Craigslist-is-killing-your-classifieds era. I am no blog-triumphalist; there are many bloggers who are great analysts and media critics, but it still takes on-the-ground fact-gathering journalists to provide the raw material which powers these sites, and the blogosphere hasn't generated too many of those yet.

Speaking of which: Bill Simmons may soon replace Theo Ratliff as having the most intriguing expiring contract in sports, as he's currently pissed at ESPN and severely curtailing his written output for reasons listed as "certain promises were not kept". This may relate to ESPN's canceling of a scheduled podcast interview by Simmons of Sen. Obama, but who knows? I would bet that at this point, a standalone advertiser-supported Simmons site with community discussion boards would be extremely lucrative for him.

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