"Discovery consists of seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what nobody has thought" Albert von Szent-Gyorgyi

Great article in the latest CJR, a must read by Steve Twomey.

American readers want more voice, more connection to where they live. So why has the great metro columnist gone missing?

"Too many are lazy," says Dave Lieber, an investigative columnist at the Fort Worth Star-Telgram and the chairman of this year's annual meeting of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. Lieber has a litany of complaints about his peers: "They refuse to, as Breslin says, climb stairs. Don't engage in new journalism storytelling techniques. Refuse to be innovative, take risks and fail, which is important. Don't want to get people angry, which is very important. Want to play it safe. Quote their friends. Write feature stories that pretend to be columns. Forget why they got in the business in the first place. Make stupid jokes."

So many columnists sound so alike. Tim J McGuire...says "One of the things you find when you read a lot of metro columnists...is there's not a lot of difference between Hoboken and Timbuktu."

"...a newspaper needs a sizzling metro columnist more than it ever did in any Golden Age."

Bravo Steve! Excellent points. Read the entire piece here


I agree with Steve...we are not talking about op-ed here but the real deal, the local writer that is hardwired into the community. The stuff that rises to the quality of a Royko, Breslin, or Hamill.