And the thing is, though you have different kinds of columnists, Richard Cohen, I think, for a long time, for example, was a metro columnist at the Washington Post. Mike Barnicle we ve been talking about in Boston Mike Royko in Chicago almost become staples of the local culture, local lure a hurricane out in San Francisco. I couldn t disagree with you more. That s the same thing I do in New York. There is no difference where you are.
Location has nothing to do with it.
A day s work in London, in Leeds, or in New York, or Boston, it s all the same. We do hold them to the same standards that we hold our reporters to, and in some sense, columnists have an out-sized influence on a newspaper, both good and in the case of Barnicle and Smith bad. Were a reporter to have done something akin to what Smith or Barnicle did, I think the effect on the Globe and on the profession and where that story was played throughout the country certainly would have been far less. So the sense the notion that one should expect less of a columnists or check less or vet less or challenge less strikes me as lopsided. I think you allow them certainly license by way of interpretation.