Blogger Underbelly-Buce writes better obit of E&P than E&P

Editor and Publisher is kaput. I will miss it. Not very badly, since I am long out of the newspaper business. But badly enough.

I began perusing its classified ads as a college newspaper editor in search of summer jobs and a career. More recently, nearly a half century after college graduation, I still perused its editorial content on the web — as a clue to what was going on in the business I had fecklessly abandoned in my early 20s, in search of better money.

I made the money. Or what I thought was money in my naive youth. But I always missed the adrenalin-fueled joy of being there when gangsters, hookers, politicians, clowns, killers, cops, suicides and celebrities did their thing. Not to mention the occasional triumph of finding out — before anyone else did — what they were doing that they didn't want the world to know.

I was about to write a long appreciation of E&P, but my friend Underbelly-Buce, my first mentor at the college newspaper, has explained the initial attraction better than I could.

As it turns out, he also explained it better than the two writers at E&P who covered the loss of their own pay checks. Well, that's understandable. It's never a good idea to ask someone to cover his own execution.