Marc Fisher Is Gone Fishin'

With his final column, Marc Fisher examines the highlight reel from his career total of 1,250 columns for the Washington Post and an additional 1,200 posts for Raw Fisher. Fisher pores over the perennial debates at the heart of his column -- failing schools, wishful transit schemes, cynical bureaucracy -- and finds that Washington hasn't changed much, even if the way we talk has. Underlining his discussion of the transition from newsprint to new media is a polite complaint about the direction of journalism. There's a wistfulness to his criticism that the proliferation of opinion journalism (I take it he means blogging) is "elbowing out the rigorous work of reporting." Fisher's no David Simon raging against the perceived collapse of beat reporting, but Fisher's new project bespeaks a dissatisfaction with the way things are. "Starting next month, I'll be putting together a group of writers whose job it will be to tell the truths of the Washington area in compelling and essential ways, combining traditional storytelling with new forms that involve and engage the people who live here." If anything, Fisher's "journalistic SWAT team" sounds like an alt-weekly within a newspaper. It also sounds like a potentially great outlet for Fisher's well-reasoned curmudgeonliness, his acute local radar, and his catalog of characters and contacts in the city -- all, I think, the distinctive takeaways from his column.