phased out

Apologies that this post is a couple of weeks late. It got lost among my drafts, but I still want to post it … because it’s still relevant.

Quirky, cranky humorist James Lileks has had his weekly column cut. He still has a job at the Minneapolis Star Tribune if he wants it: reporting local news. That’s the way it goes in the media and entertainment biz these days, of course.

Nancy Nall, having been there herself, has a lot of bilious but cathartic things to say about the Brave New Media World:

It is, with a few details changed, pretty much exactly what happened to me five years ago at a fading p.m. daily in far-less-glamorous Fort Wayne, Indiana. Perhaps I can offer the pint-size pundit some perspective.

Sometimes I feel like journalism’s coal-mine canary. All the stuff that started happening in 2002 at our paper, the stuff that had my friends at bigger papers saying, “Wow, that’s terrible. So far, knock wood, we here at the Major Metro Times-Bugle are OK” — that’s happening everywhere now. Even Lileks, if he could stop the furious cycle of his narcissism for five minutes, would have to agree that having a job as a full-time humor columnist at a large-circulation daily is a little like being Henry Ford’s buggy-whip polisher in 1905. I’m sure his vision is somewhat clouded, though, by his status as a right-wing web star; his allies’ gift for understatement (”newspaper suicide”) is already muddying the waters. They forget the Lileks they know, with his daily Bleat and radio appearances and one-joke books, is not the Lileks the Star-Tribune readers know, the writer who offers 250-word dispatches on his sniffles, his dessert choices and …oh, I seem to have reached my limit of free Star-Tribune stories for today, but you can do your own explorations here. To them, the effect of killing the Daily Quirk is the destruction of their boy’s meal ticket. He gets paid for the Quirk; the rest of the stuff he does free. If they like him so much, they need to get acquainted with that 20th-century concept of paying for content.

I haven’t followed up to see if Lileks got a new gig, or if he responded to Nall’s post.
Nothing is forever, and in some quarters, it’s just beginning to sink in.