The Best Angry Goodbye Notes from Fired Journalists

"Only when a journalist is fired or quits does the complete fury he feels for those quacking mallards who have made his life miserable begin to surface," writes Jack Shafer at Slate. He's collected a few of the best kiss-off notes from fired journalists on his blog, and some of them are truly amazing. "Jesus spent three days in Hell. … I could only handle one," —wrote Richard Morgan, who quit Gawker after one day in January 2008. And another favorite: "Don't worry about me; I'll land on my feet. I don't regret coming here, even though I've been laid off now. In fact, my only regret is that you haven't come to visit the Beacon Journal. I would have loved to piss on your shoes," wrote Mark Schlueb, in a letter to Knight Ridder CEO Tony Ridder, in April 2001 Unsurprisingly, Tina Brown gets a few mentions. Who knew she wasn't popular? "If some ditzy American editor went to London, took over the Spectator and turned it into, say, In Your Face: A Magazine of Mucus, there would be a big uproar, but here in America, we expect turnover," wrote Garrison Keillor, after Brown replaced Robert Gottlieb as editor of The New Yorker in April 1995. And after his Newsweek blog was canceled by incoming editor Brown in 2011, Mickey Kaus wrote, "The people at the Daily Beast seem to be having a desperate sort of faux-fun as they try to madly generate paying hits before Barry Diller's money runs out subsidizing Ms. Brown's big bucks staff." The whole collection, well worth the read, is at Slate.

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The Best Angry Goodbye Notes from Fired Journalists

Ujala Sehgal

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Ujala Sehgal