I haven't even read the whole article carefully yet, but here are my thoughts. Editors shouldn't abdicate. I don't want to read anyone's first draft. And all your Letters to the Editor should be signed with their writers' real names and their identities verified before they are published. In a police state it might be different, but in a free society, if an opinion isn't worthy of being signed, it shouldn't be published.

Feedback does work better now even with more traditional media. I was emailing a writer in a local paper because I felt his stories on a local hot topic were not covering all sides- okay, I accused him of bias and of wanting to work for Fox News one day. He responded and I ended up giving him names of people with a different take on the story. We have since talked on the phone and he turned out to be a very nice guy. I apologized for the Fox News remark, just because that is a really low blow.

I would not mind Salon only allowing premium members to post directly to the letters pages. If a troll or wingnut wants to come here to rant and try to disrupt an nice exchange of thoughts, he/she should have to pay for the privilege. In a less severe move, you could put a button next to the "All Letters" and "Red Star Letters" buttons which reads "Premium and Red Star Letters." Then people could be more selective of the letters they are reading.

How dare you post the old canard about Gore inventing the Internet on an article about journalism? Chutzpah?

While I sympathize with old media writers who are trying to keep their balance and sanity as their world undergoes a paradigm shift, I can't help but marvel at their sense of entitlement and injured aristocratic mentality. Where is it written that anyone has the right to express themselves and not bear the consequences of that expression? As if you can just release a missive, no matter how wrongheaded, into the universe, get paid, and go on your merry way. Well, not anymore, huh?

As to the professionalism argument - exquisite craftsmanship in the expression of an idea matters much less than the value of the idea itself. What is really getting to old media writers now is that their ideas are being attacked, and by people who - horrors - can't write as well as they. Well, it's not fanciful, whimsical, flowery, elegant, heartrending, or otherwise notable writing that enrages people. The bottom line: stop blathering stupid ideas and people will stop attacking you for being stupid.

Take, for instance, a putatively au courant writer who loudly and continually brayed that there was no evidence for the stealing of the past two presidential elections, and who did incalculable damage by trumpeting his opinions, so that the right could point to them and say, see, even a lefty doesn't think anything happened, heh-heh-heh, and so that people who knew in their hearts something was wrong but who didn't have the skills to overcome his silver-tongued eloquence second-guessed themselves and sat stumped, stymied and confounded. Please take him.

The recent convictions in Ohio for election fraud, as well as other ongoing investigations and trials, probably haven't given this writer pause. Oh, no. He's a Journalist *trumpet fanfare*. He probably hasn't thought twice about what could have happened had he been a little more knowledgeable and a little less of a wordsmith. Had he done even the tiniest bit of research, he would have known that proof of election fraud has little to do with overt eye-witness evidence of malfeasance, as he naively, incorrectly, and repetitively asserted, and everything to do with improbable and unexpected outcomes, such as heretofore reliable exit polls being wrong in, strangely enough, just enough venues to swing the election. His ideas mattered, and he had a platform from which to spread them like the plague.

Luckily, the influx of Internet writers, fact-checkers, bloggers - basically, people who care about ideas and their consequences - render incompetent blowhards more irrelevant every day. Even if the blowhards can turn a phrase.

Since feedback is the point here, let me offer some. This piece was Talesian in length -- just over 5,230 words, even though the concept behind it was uncomplicated. The paragraphs are big and dense and made one's eyes stutter. I'm a devoted reader, but I found myself skimming for the facts and hard points. What I found was lots of bloviation.

Online publications may have unlimited space for self-indulgence, but that doesn't excuse it. Take a tip from the print world. Letting people have a say is fine, but if you really want more readers don't waste their time. Make your point quickly, with strength, and move on. Otherwise you'll bore them away.

Perhaps the author of this piece should stop patting himself on the back long enough to consider this thought: all of us filthy prols who are holding you back from greatness and ruining your work with our feedback are your customers.

You’re not an artist, you’re an employee. You’re producing a product to be consumed. If you expect us to pay to read your writing (through advertising or subscription), we expect to be able to respond. Maybe there’s some ideal world where writers can achieve their true potential without being sullied by the opinions of the rabble, but it’s not this world.

Accept the medium for what it really is: a dialog. A dialog where one speaker is given a huge soapbox so that they may pitch their ideas to an uncertain number of other speakers, all equipped with tiny soapboxes.

Maybe a column will generate a lot of feedback because it’s challenging and provoking, or maybe it will generate a lot of feedback just because it sucks. But either way, we have the right to decide for ourselves how to feel about it, and how to respond to it. And if that hurts a writer’s feelings, or makes them timid... well, that’s the cost of doing business. And Salon is – first, foremost, and always – a business.