Where were you when first you heard the news Howard Fineman was leaving Newsweek for the “chance to dive headlong into the future” at that scrappy tech-savvy digital upstart you may have heard of with the somewhat unfortunate name, “Huffington Post”?I think I was on the Metro, at one of those stops like Columbia Heights or U Street Cardozo where you can still get BlackBerry reception, even if you are still under contract with Tmobile, but I can’t be totally sure because even though I read it on Howard Kurtz‘s Twitter first I needed to see it RT-ed a few times for the occasion’s momentousness to sink in, and even then I only really can claim to have grasped the true symbolic heft of the occasion when I “asked”*  a “confidential source” I know in the professional punditry business for some expert analysis. “I think it’s just considered a big deal when a well known print writer goes to an internet-only publication,” replied the source, a well-known print writer who defected for an internet-only publication only to eventually wind up back at another well-known print publication (albeit one that few have seen in its print form in the past decade). Well duh of course! I thought.

As we approach the fifteenth anniversary of Michael Kinsley‘s historic defection from whatever he did before he launched Slate to the brave new blaboverse of online-only journalism, it is useful to once again reflect on what has become a modern classic in the spectrum of media careerism story lines, the type of occurrence that might seem to have lost some of its narrative power as print publications have launched blogs and integrated (if only virtually) their print newsrooms with their digital ones, and as online news outlets have marshaled mercenary teams of investigative and enterprise reporters to whom overextended print publications can outsource their sudden demand for substance…

Ha ha just kidding, of course! No offense to Fineman, but the longtime blogger leaving the sad rag that almost sold for a dollar for Arianna Huffington’s Blackwater of Search Engine Optimization isthe total ne plus ultra of non-stories, the apotheosis of stupid things that journalists keep track of because figuring out how to summarize that Kabul Bank scandal in 140 characters is not gonna happen. As Fineman himself told his namesake Kurtz of his BlackBerry blogging duties at the 2004 Democratic convention:

We’re all going to spend our time reading each other’s blogs and blog our way to oblivion. If there was any real news, we’d all be too busy to blog.

Or, put another way…

*via G-chat