TV Critics Now as Unnecessary as International News Bureaus 37083

Now with these newfangled blogs and such, everyone’s a critic! Which means professional critics – whose bylines appear in respectable publications like newspapers instead of titles that end in “.com” – are losing their relevancy. Or at least their corporate employers think so! So the higher ups have been cutting back on the staff positions of the nation’s opinionated pop culture critics, like those whose job it is to tell you whether that new USA series Burn Notice is worth investing in.

Reports Variety:

About a year ago, one of the nation’s most-respected crix — Ed Bark of the Dallas Morning News — left his longtime home after accepting a buyout offer. The Belo-owned paper has said it wants more local coverage — just not of the local TV market, where Belo also owns a major TV outlet.

Over at the Philadelphia Inquirer, Jonathan Storm is still TV critic, but after a quarter-century of columnizing, colleague Gail Shister is being bumped to the metro beat as of Aug. 1. And Denver’s Rocky Mountain News hasn’t replaced legendary critic Dusty Saunders, who retired May 31 after more than 50 years at the paper.

More recently, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution — the paper of record for the nation’s ninth-largest TV market — decided to take critic Jill Vejnoska off the daily TV beat. “Now I know how the cast of ‘Yes, Dear’ must’ve felt,” she wrote in her cancellation notice.

So you can imagine how awesome Alessandra Stanley thinks she is, getting to keep her TV column even after being recognized as the most error-prone television chronicler of our time. How much more amusing, then, that the brilliant Troy Patterson has found so much success at Slate. As in Slate.com.