In a Balkanized world of clashing ethnic identities, divided ideologies and diverse religious practices, columnists wander onto a page blithely assuming a universality of experience that allows them to speak informally to anyone. In a time of electronic communication, the column somehow remains wedded to the printed page. Columns don't translate well to television. TV time is too valuable, TV viewers too impatient, to allow someone to woolgather or tell stories that don't come to a point within 10 seconds. Most of us are too plain for television and our volume is too low for radio.
Nobody goes on radio unless they're mad at somebody.
The Net allows anyone to set up a site and be a columnist. Now everyone owns the equivalent of a press. But take it from an old content-provider, if you read this on a computer screen, it's not because anybody paid me. The early press was a lot like the Web in that most writers were amateurs and partisans. Fact and opinion, news and rumor flowed together indistinguishably.