Sad news this morning, and we're pretty sure it's the fault of the goddamned blogs: Tony Kornheiser, after nearly 30 years at the Washington Post, has accepted a buyout from the paper.
Kornheiser announced it on his radio show this morning.
"All I ever wanted to be was a newspaper writer," he said, which is not something that anyone under the age of 30 will ever say again. "This other stuff is great, but I don't care about it," he continued. "In my mind that's what it says on the headstone, it says 'newspaper guy.' "
But he also said he signed the papers to take the Post's buyout last night. He said he still might contract with The Post to do his Talking Points videos and his Page 2 excerpts, and he said some people in the leadership asked him to stay but didn't really insist, and he said he feared he'd never have the moral high ground again. And, as any longtime listeners would expect, he was plenty wistful when discussing what happened yesterday. "There was not enough wine in the world, there wasn't, not last night," he said.
How sad: Not only does Kornheiser have to announce his buyout, but he has to do it while hungover.
We appreciate Kornheiser's sadness about all this, and can't imagine how it must feel. Though, to be fair, we suspect his buyout package, along with the ESPN and radio money, should make for quite a comfortable golden parachute; the column seemed to be getting in the way of everything else anyway. We should hope that everyone else being bought out at newspapers across the country, the arts critics, the beat reporters, so on, so forth, will be so fortunate.
But godspeed, Tony: We'll miss the columns. Though we suspect we'll still be seeing you, oh, about as often as we do now.
Kornheiser Takes Buyout [DC Sports Bog]