I have no personal insights, but here's a snippet of a June 21 Ouimet posting:

Last night at the Drake Antonia Zerbisias explained to a packed room why she won't be writing a column on media criticism any more. It was all off the record but from what I understand it was a cracking good monologue and she also talked about media concentration and the big boys telling you what to think and do.

And so, today she starts her Living column and that's it for media criticism in Canadian newspapers.

Incidentally, the headline on Zerbisias's last media column was Diversity in TV ownershp protected, at least for now.

Addendum

I found this from a March 14, 2007 Tyee article, talking about why Zerbisias's blog was put on hiatus:

Lesson one: she's not the one who pulled the plug on her blog for the Star, which ground to a mysterious halt last Christmas. No, she's simply "on hiatus" -- although she took a 10-week leave of absence because of family issues.

It's the new administrative arrangement that is to blame.

"The current management doesn't see the economic value in it," she explains, noting the paper's bigwigs want to focus on the printed newspaper over the electronic one -- a bizarro business strategy given Zerbisias is read by practically everyone who cares to stay informed about media issues in Canada. So, among other things, she's keeping herself to a print column these days.

"It's been awkward," she says. "It's kind of ludicrous that the media columnist for the biggest newspaper in Canada -- in 2007 -- doesn't have a significant online presence."

Lesson two: Zerbisias has suffered bouts of blogger fatigue. Not because posting multiple times a day is gruelling, but because many of the denizens of the digital universe can be, well, a big pain in the ass sometimes. Especially in the comment threads.

"A lot of things got hijacked," she says of her now-defunct blog. "It seemed like 10 comments in, we always ended up on Israel. It was ridiculous."

Refusing to pull punches, Zerbisias was met with a torrent of ruthless abuse from determined attackers, the kind of stuff that went far beyond anything she'd experienced in her career as a print journalist.

"I felt like I was being targeted by certain people who just live, you know, to come and troll on certain pet peeves and certain pet topics."

Like many, Zerbisias couldn't refrain from replying to the crudest and most ignorant commenters. She spent hours answering all her hate mail, where she put clever ploys into action to try and irritate her attackers (like telling them the Star was paying her a nickel per response, which was of course a lie).

"I would just mock them, you know, 'Thank-you very much for your trenchant comments.... You know, whatever.'"