Jay Mariotti embraces new media by choosing oldest dot-com in existence

CHICAGO, IL — After spending several months in limbo following his sudden departure from the Chicago Sun Times, former newspaper columnist Jay Mariotti will live out his dream of entering the future of sportswriting as the third national columnist for the web’s oldest major news source, AOL.

“I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: the newspaper business is dying,” Mariotti angrily told SSNN. “But that doesn’t mean that when you switch to the medium of the future you go with just some new money, inexperienced young organization like Yahoo! or CNN/SI. You go with the proven professionals, the ones who have been in the hot new business for longer than anyone, through thick and thin – that’s AOL.”

While AOL Sports has made several high-profile hires recently — including Kevin Blackistone, Mariotti’s buddy from the ESPN TV show Around the Horn — they still are not thought of as one of the top players in the sports news business. AOL as a whole has struggled for years to catch up to current internet technology after ill-advisedly attaching itself to dial-up service.

Of course, none of this much bothers Mariotti, who bristles when asked why he didn’t choose ESPN, where he already has a relationship forged through his work on the company’s television station.

“It has been intimated that my style doesn’t fit in with ESPN,” said the far-too-curmudgeonly-for-a-Disney-owned-company Mariotti. “I don’t think that’s the case at all. I’m not evil – is it my fault that the people in sports are constantly doing things that draw my ire? No! In fact, if you take a closer look at my sordid past, I think you’ll find that most of it is somebody else’s fault.

“Just look at this Sun Times situation: I’m just over in Beijing, ignoring my editors’ requests like normal, and they get all huffy about it, so I bought a bunch of egg rolls on the company card and quit. Is it my fault that even Roger Ebert thought I was enough of a douchebag to write an open letter in the paper trashing me? Um… No! That fat bastard hates anybody as good-looking as me.”

But Mariotti insists he wants to move on from the petty controversies of his Sun Times employment, and is sure that AOL Sports is the way to best connect with the future of sports media.

“I think you’ll see in my first AOL column that I am totally past the Sun Times thing, when I actually explain to you exactly how everything went down and how I’m really not bitter about it or anything. I only even bring it up to explain to you that it’s so over,” Mariotti rambled. “Bottom line, I’m a part of the new wave now. I’m at the forefront.

“I mean, shit – we’re talking about a company whose brand is so pervasive that a whole Meg Ryan-Tom Hanks vehicle was made about the little noise they invented for email. If that’s not cutting edge, I don’t know what is.”

It’s going to be tough for this sport to sweep any nations, but it’s still pretty frickin’ cool!