In your barren Monday media column: wine journalism going the way of wino journalists, a young lady makes a magazine for Christians, Romenesko got jokes, and pay walls cometh.

All "newspapers" these days are in the wine business, which is far more lucrative than the newspaper business. Now, journalism is suffering for it: the WSJ is discontinuing its wine column. For conflict of interest reasons, or economic ones? Either way, this blog calls it "yet another brick falling from the crumbling wall of professional wine journalism," a metaphor that deserves repeating.


Oh! Here is a 20 year-old journalism major (from Florida!) who is starting a Christian girl's magazine. "Growing up, reading magazines, I would read Seventeen, but my parents wanted me to read Christian magazines. But I felt like Christian magazines didn't have anything that was really of substance, it was all pretty sheltering, and, at the same time, Seventeen was a little too shocking." Support her by visiting her website! In these times we should all be supporting one another in this doomed field of journalism, cause when it all comes crashing down around us, Christian girls will probably be like "whatever" and just start having sex with anyone around, so be ready.


Do you sufficiently appreciate Romensko's sly wit? The King of all Journalism is on Twitter this week writing things like this: "Julia Child would sit under the umbrellas at Costco in Santa Barbara, devouring the store's hot dogs. http://is.gd/5EiEc." You think Romenesko is all serious but he is not.


2010 will finally be the year of the online media pay wall. Only 10 years too late! Here is Alan Mutter with an ominous quote: "One of the problems is newspapers fired so many journalists and turned them loose to start so many blogs...They should have executed them. They wouldn't have had competition. But they foolishly let them out alive." Now we will eat everyone!