More on Jay Mariotti exit

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: Mariotti: Love-hate even in exit : : My memory of Jay Mariotti at his most Mariotti-est goes back 10 years, when we were sharing an apartment in Nagano, Japan, while covering the Winter Games for the Sun-Times. : Like a two-man bobsled team trying to outrace a bus in our competition with the hordes the Tribune sent to cover the Games, we should have had more than enough ground to cover right in front of us. Yet, even 6,000 miles from home, he managed to write yet another column ripping Bulls management despite the Nagano dateline. : Time zones were no more likely to rein in him and his outsized sense of outrage than his editors, who marveled and benefited from his prolific output but sometimes wished he would lighten up. : And now he has, quitting the Sun-Times Tuesday, after 17 years. : Mariotti has taken a break from pounding on Jerry Reinsdorf, Halas Hall and the Tribsters who run the Cubs to slam his old employer, Sun-Times Media Group, which is having a worse season than any of them. : Whatever benefits the Sun-Times parent hoped for from a $50 million cost-cutting campaign earlier this year have vanished in revenue declines that haven't abated. : The remaining Sun-Times newsroom staffers, who were reminded by a memo Wednesday from editor Michael Cooke that another round of cuts is imminent, hardly need one more tutorial in the newspaper industry's woes—even through the prism of Mariotti's impassioned complaints about the shortcomings of its Web site. : "Any paper without a quality, progressive Web site is dead meat," Mariotti explained by e-mail. "[The] Sun-Times is dead meat." : What they took away instead from Mariotti's abrupt exit, if anything, was the hope that getting his six-figure salary off the books might reduce the number of jobs on the chopping block this time. : Sources said that about 10 jobs had been in play. Cooke said talks with the Newspaper Guild continue, and indicated things would be clearer by the end of next week. : "To state the obvious: This is awful. We are all anxious," Cooke wrote. : Some ought to be especially anxious, as questions such as "How many gossip columnists does a paper need?" are hotly debated. : All over newspaperland, it's the same story. Here at the larger Tribune, the newsroom just lost 80 employees in the year's second round of cuts. : Yet shortly after Sun-Times Media Group Chief Executive Cyrus Freidheim Jr. warned of more cuts if revenue continued to slide at the company's mid-June annual meeting, a release boasted the extension of Mariotti's contract into 2011. Cooke was quoted in that release as saying the Sun-Times was "excited to continue working with Jay." : In a reversal worthy of Mariotti's hate-love relationship with the 2005 World Series champion White Sox, Cooke's statement Wednesday included this zinger: "We wish Jay well and will miss him—not personally, of course—but in the sense of noticing he is no longer here, at least for a few days." : Mariotti hammered his way into the city's consciousness, often through blunt force and repetition. : He dominated conversation, not just among sports fans but among the local media fraternity, who debated his methods (such as his allergy to locker rooms) as much as anything he wrote. : In fact, he might have been more discussed than actually read. But he nonetheless became so much a part of the Sun-Times brand that the cash-strapped paper always felt compelled to re-sign him. : The Sun-Times was acting as though it was glad to be rid of Mariotti, contemplating a celebration of his departure as a boon to readership in Thursday's paper. "They're mad because I went on the radio today and honestly answered questions about the weak health of the paper," Mariotti said. "I feel like I'm getting off the Titanic." : One rumor on which Mariotti would not comment had him bound for Boston and an array of multimedia opportunities. How he would find flaws in a city with defending champs in basketball and baseball is anyone's guess. : : (Phil Rosenthal)

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