Jim Romenesko, a legendary media blogger considered a must-read among journalists, marked a kind of retirement Wednesday on his blog.
In a note to readers under a recent post, Romenesko appended a strikethrough to an announcement that he would be posting sporadically while on vacation, substituting “retirement” for “vacation.” The note also says his blog is no longer accepting sponsored posts or job ads.
Via email, Romenesko tells Poynter that he intends to remain active on Twitter, Facebook and other social media channels and that he will post “when I see something that interests me.”
“I suspect that’ll happen quite a lot,” Romenesko writes.
Romenesko’s note to readers comes less than a month after he announced he was taking a vacation from compiling his regular morning briefing of media news from around the Web.
Romenesko has announced a version of retirement before. In 2011, during his run as a reporter for Poynter.org, he and former editor Julie Moos announced that he was entering “semi-retirement,” wherein he would post to this website “casually” as he prepared to launch his eponymous blog. Shortly after, he departed from Poynter amid questions of improper attribution raised by a former assistant editor at Columbia Journalism Review.
Romenesko’s exit from Poynter, which he established as a clearinghouse for media news, became the subject of discussion among media watchers inside and outside the Institute. Depending on who you listened to, his departure followed an overzealous reaction from Poynter or a public outing of journalistic infractions. Writing for Poynter shortly after the incident, Adam Hochberg noted that Romenesko’s critics “were in the minority”:
NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen tweeted that the attribution concerns are a “non-issue”; David Carr at The New York Times said Moos’ post explaining the situation “seemed like an answer in search of a problem.” Writing in the Awl, Choire Sicha said, “Romenesko’s entire practice was about giving credit, in ways that virtually no other blog has been.” Sicha said he knows no writers who’ve complained about Romenesko misappropriating their work.
