Everybody loves blogs! Even Phil Rosenthal

Great news this Monday morning -- one of my favorite journalists on any beat, Phil Rosenthal, finally has his own blog. So now he can fully cover the collapse of MSM instead of picking and choosing which items to cover for his must-read column in the Chicago Tribune.

Phil, who shares a name and love of delicatessans with the creator of "Everybody Loves Raymond," has been a friend and colleague since way back, when he was still writing a column for the L.A. Daily News and I was still toiling at a desk job in Chicago. No one is better at this beat than Phil. The more of him the better (which, as you can see from his photograph, is saying something).

With the recent retirement of Rob Feder from the rival Sun-Times, it's an excellent chance for Phil to lock in all those readers who had gotten used to Feder's total coverage of local broadcasting.

Comments

[Mark Jeffries]

And in case you didn't know, Feder's official replacement at the Sun-Times is advertising columnist Lewis Lazare, the snooty fop who has shown in his stint at the Times (after writing an arts business column for the Reader and reporting for Crain's Chicago Business) that he doesn't know anything about what the kids like and doesn't care.

When he was still at the Reader, he attended a benefit for a theater company I do things for in Chicago, where he pretty much acted like a stuck-up fool the whole evening. He was banned from all future benefits by the company. For that and other reasons, I have not changed my post-Feder strategy of only buying the Sun-Times on Fridays for Ebert's movie reviews (as you know, they haven't had a TV critic since Doug Elfman was canned earlier this year), despite the alleged USAToday-ification of the Trib.

[Jeff]

I'm not a fan of Phil's. Before he moved to media review, I found his print tv reviews really negative - I knew what not to watch but never learned what he loved. That's when I discovered TV Barn and Mo Ryan. Phil's a good writer so if you like that style, he's your man.

[T Dog]

I liked reading Phil's columns in the Sun-Times and later in the Tribune. He certainly knows a lot about the media business and I found his work quite enjoyable and informative. He'll fill the void left by Feder's retirement quite nicely.