Posted 11:49 AM by Gene

One other thing about David Gurgle Jr. getting down: Here we have a prime reason why SLIMES and other hopeful news hacks will NOT be able to charge for the news. It was one thing when colyumnists were characters for the right reasons, when people actually read them for insights they'd find nowhere else. But typists like Gurgle and "BS" Noonan and EJ are ecomaniacs in print obsessively recycling conventional wisdom. Who wants to read the same old same old over and over? And op-ed sections are supposedly central to newspapers' identities. Somewhere some blogger not making millions a year like MB2 is far more worth reading, but because newspapers must run the same colyumnists over and over that blogger won't get exposed. Colyumning infers a consistent level of quality, or at least the expectation of quality. The only level we get these days is low. It's also an excuse to vastly overpay people in a trade that should never have done so in the first place, and now can't afford it. It may not help the biz financially but the time has come to ditch the regular opinion colyumnist and put a variety of voices in his place. The newspaper has avoided intellectual diversity long enough.