Roger Ebert to Jay Mariotti: 'On Your Way Out, Don't Let the Door Bang You on the Ass'

Until he resigned this week, Jay Mariotti had been the second most famous columnist at the Chicago Sun-Times. The paper's most famous columnist, Roger Ebert, is the latest to tell Mariotti, "Good riddance."

An open letter from Ebert to Mariotti includes the following:

What an ugly way to leave the Sun-Times. It does not speak well for you. Your timing was exquisite. You signed a new contract, waited until days after the newspaper had paid for your trip to Beijing at great cost, and then resigned with a two-word e-mail: "I quit." You saved your explanation for a local television station.

As someone who was working here for 24 years before you arrived, I think you owed us more than that. You owed us decency. The fact that you saved your attack for TV only completes our portrait of you as a rat....

On your way out, don't let the door bang you on the ass.

Ebert is a brilliant writer and is at his best when he's skewering his subject, whether it's a badly made film or, in this case, a former colleague.

But I also think Steve Rhodes of The Beachwood Reporter is right to ask, "If Mariotti was such a plague upon the Sun-Times and its readers, why did [Sun-Times editor Michael] Cooke continue to pay him so much money for all these years? And why did the paper put his face on buses and advertisements and other promotional materials?"

It's quite clear that a whole lot of Mariotti's Sun-Times colleagues never liked him. I'm not sure why almost all of them (with the notable exception of Rick Telander) felt the need to wait until he was out the door to say so.