Star-Ledger Death Watch - Izenberg's Still At It

Well, another Super Bowl has passed. And of course sports columnist Jerry Izenberg was there "covering it" for the Star-Ledger. Which amounted, as far as I can tell, to but two (or was it three?) columns,each of which could have been written without one's actual physical presence in New Orleans.

The Ledger loves identifying Izenberg, who actually retired several years ago,  as one of only  two sportswriters who've covered every Super Bowl since the first. Somehow, however, the paper never gets around to identifying the other sportswriter. Oh well, I suppose we should be grateful that they've dropped that truly awful "columnist emeritus" sobriquet they used to pin on the old hack.

Still, even as I don't totally begrudge him his annual junket, it hints that the Ledger, which just two weeks ago again cut back on its reporting and editorial staff, is quite cavalier about money when it involves one of their seeming beloved old sweats. Really,too, the sad fact remains that Izenberg is a truly bad writer. The man views metaphors as the verbal equivalent of mix-ins in ice cream cones, and he will leap desperately for each and every deplorably inapt and pretentious usage with thudding reliability. That the Ledger allows him to  go on so makes me think that it just holds its reading audience in contempt. Thus, too, that the speculation that Si Newhouse will try and milk the Ledger and its rapidly declining revenues and circulation numbers for as long as possible, then just shut it down abruptly.

Since I suspect that Izenberg would probably in his stead like to hold on until the Super Bowl comes to New Jersey (and he is especially baldly tiresome with his metaphors about the Meadowlands and predictably inane references to Hoffa maybe being buried there, to the point where I always wish upon him an attack by rabid muskrats born and raised in East Rutherford), I half-hope the Ledger shuts before that. It has milked New Jersey readers and advertisers for much too long already.

And if one believes that the Ledger could well do with new editorial blood, gallons and gallons of it if it's to even have a distant chance of survival, then there is even more pressing need to quick get rid of Izenberg and all that his survival at the Ledger connotes about dear dead old journalistic days.

 Really, Jerry, it's way past time that you paid for your own ticket to the Super Bowl. In fact to any game or event in any sport.