News and Media
Best Waste of Precious Media Resources
Michael Sragow’s fate at
Published: September 21, 2011
Michael Sragow came to the Sun in 2001 after building an august career as a film critic, having written about movies for decades for publications such as Rolling Stone, the San Francisco Examiner, and The New Yorker. Over the past 10 years, in addition to plying Sun readers with his erudite, heartfelt, and often breakaway opinions about the latest cinema offerings, he worked as an editor on a collection of polymath film-nut James Agee’s writing for the Library of America and wrote an acclaimed biography of Victor Fleming, a somewhat obscure figure despite having directed both The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind. A lot of other things happened over the past decade, as film criticism waned as a professional wheelhouse and cash-strapped traditional media organizations retrenched furiously. But we were astonished when Sragow’s weekly review bylines were replaced by de facto Tribune Co. wire copy a few years ago, and Sragow was relegated to blogging about movies for the Sun’s web site. Now, with the most recent round of newsroom cost-cutting, Sragow has been reassigned and is leaving behind writing about movies on a regular basis altogether, as he announced at the beginning of a series of recent blog posts recapping his career. We’re sure he’s grateful not to be looking for work elsewhere right now, but it’s a loss for the Sun, and for its readers.
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