Jay Mariotti resigns

armageddon - I'm sorry, but it is silly for someone to take it as a personal affront that Jay Mariotti didn't want to be a columnist at the Chicago Sun-Times any longer.

 

Was being sarcastic. He's not the Trib's style, past or present, and frankly think he can get bigger bucks, online.

 

Not exactly that simple.

But the amount of criticism on this board toward colleagues, with few exceptions, is almost in exact proportion to the success said people have achieved in their professions.

The odds of it being a remarkable coincidence are, well, zero.

 

All this venom and jealousy (yes, some of these posts are straight green with envy) by us discussing at length the pros and (mostly) cons of Mariotti, didn't he in fact do what he was hired and paid to do.

Write stuff that a lot of people read. Want to be jealous about something, be jealous of that. He had millions (print, online, TV) of folks opining on his opinions.

He's a columnist. That's what he's supposed to do. Whether he chose to go into locker rooms is his choice and his alone (and we can start another thread on the pros and cons of that, if you wish) but the bottom line is people loved him, hated and read him.

He did his job and did it well on those accounts.

 

He writes well.

But the core's rotten, and I never went out of my way to read his stuff.

 

He'll end up on the web, and good for him. It's a career choice, everyone is free to make them. Can't see his crime there.

As for the nastiness he elicits here, I would divide the mob into two (disproportionate) teams: those who just don't like how/what he writes, and those who know him personally and professionally and base their comments on real-life experience.

Most people in the latter category would tell you their comments have nothing to do with jealousy.

 

Ahh, now I understand the quote better.

The editor didn't know? That is fucking crazy.

 

Also, so what if he quit right after "going to China on the paper's dime"?

That's not his right?

He provided them with columns, they paid him for them.

He can quit any time he damn well pleases, just like any of us. He doesn't owe the Sun-Times another minute of his time because they sent him to the Olympics. It wasn't charity. He was working.

 

Waylon, that's the same reason I think a lot of this in jelousy. A few (and I stress a few here) thinking, "How dare he get sent to China then quit. I would never do that."

 

That irks me, as well as the comments about how "noble" it would be to "man up" and stay in newspapers.

Meanwhile, his paper's leadership is gutting the news operations around him. But it would be "noble" to stay on?

I hear this same garbage, on a smaller, less vitriolic, more passive-aggressive aggressive scale when it comes to my own impending exit. And go back and find some of the reaction to Chris Snow's exit from the Boston Globe.

It just gets tiring after a while.

 

Going to China on the paper's dime? You've got to be fucking kidding me...

Spoken like someone who has never had to cover an Olympics.

 

You want to expand on that ...
Are you suggesting Mariotti paid his own way?