Gossip is the new pornography

In one case yes, said Seattle Post-Intelligencer art critic Regina Hackett. Writing on her PI blog (since taken down but Google cached here) about her art critic colleage at the Seattle Times, Sheila Farr, Hackett wrote (with the bitchy title “Seattle Times art critic signs off. When was she on?”):

After the Seattle Times eliminated her job, art critic Sheila Farr declined to stick around as an arts reporter. Her self-congradulatory sign off ran in the Times on Sunday, here.

Suffice it to say she’s the opposite of James Brown, the hardest working man in show business. What did she accomplish? By doing so little, she tanked her job. The decline of newspapers can’t be news to anybody who works at one. She performed as if we were in the old days, when jobs were a given. She turned her position into fat, and the Seattle Times is on a diet.

Acccording to her, she wasn’t a good fit for a newspaper anyway. (Thanks for taking the job away from somebody who would have been.)

Wrote Farr:

When I began writing about art 20 years ago, I never aimed to become a staff writer at a daily paper. The hit-and-run pace of newspapers is not my default mode, being naturally more inclined to research, contemplation and working my way to the core of things.

The core of things? Where is the review of hers that gets to the core of things? I want to be gracious here but can’t. She failed her newspaper, the arts community and readers. Now there’s an official hole where her unofficial hole used to be.

From TechFlash via Slog.