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It sucks when critics don’t like you, but it is absolutely terrifying to contemplate the idea that your most talented colleagues secretly hate you. It’s even worse to imagine those people telling a columnist that you suck, worse still to see that written up in your local paper in a not-blind blind item that has enough clues to let you figure out who hates you while still protecting their public anonymity.
To be clear, this is more about the bloggers than the Sun-Times column. The column wasn’t particularly hard to find; it was slightly harder to find a free copy, but not that hard. I know blogs are cool, or the total opposite, but daily newspapers still have the inside track on a lot of things, for better or worse, and sometimes they’re not as different as people think.
Advertising preys on our vanity, but it also taxes it; it’s the engine that drives the information economy, and we can use the inefficiency of the market (why are there John McCain ads on the Reader site? hell if I know) to support honorable works. Somewhere someone who doesn’t care about the forgotten cities of eastern Russia is buying something I don’t want, and they’re paying a very small premium that allows me to read a couple thousand words of excellent journalism. If there’s something wrong with the system, as a professional and amateur beneficiary I’m just as responsible.
Footnote: As promised, an excerpt from the September 26, 2006 Sun-Times column mentioned above:
