Jay Mariotti, the bitter Chicago sports columnist who has a bizarre allergy to locker rooms, went to Beijing to cover the Olympics and had an epiphany: Newspapers are in trouble! So he decided to jump ship before things got really bad! So one of the highest-paid newspaper columnists faxed in his resignation letter this week.

Mariotti said in a phone interview that he decided to quit after it became clear while in China that sports journalism had become “entirely a Web site business. There were not many newspapers there.” He added that most of the journalists covering the Games were “there writing for Web sites.”

What could have scared him in Beijing? The fact that one sports columnist was enjoying penis soup and another was getting a foot massage while the Yahoo army – which we hear was second only to the New York Times in terms of staffers [Ed. We've been notified USA Today, Sports Illustrated, and the Washington Post had more.] – churned out enough copy to beat NBC in online readership?

In 2008, by our count, Mariotti is the fifth big-name, big-city columnist to run screaming from newspapers:
* JA Adande, LA Times (buyout)
* Tony Kornheiser, Washington Post (buyout)
* Dan LeBatard, Miami Herald (sabbatical)
* Selena Roberts, New York Times (Sports Illustrated)

And that’s just the short list of major columnists whose names you’d recognize because they’ve done national TV work; it doesn’t begin to account for the two dozen (at least) beat writers and feature writes who have left papers for online destinations such as ESPN.com, Yahoo, Sports Illustrated, Fox Sports, etc.

We may revisit this topic later. We have an email in to Mariotti, and we also hope to take the temperature of the industry once all the ink-stained wretches wake up. Wait – can we even use that phrase anymore?

Controversial columnist Jay Mariotti resigns from Chicago Sun-Times (Chicago Tribune)