By Maya Trent · Republished 2026-05-20 · Originally reported by Tina Dupuy on FishbowlLA, 2011
In March 2011 the FishbowlLA editor turned the lens around, noting that she herself had been the subject of an Editor & Publisher interview — a small, knowing bit of media-covering-media.
Then
The post pointed readers to a Q&A by Rob Tornoe in Editor & Publisher, the venerable newspaper trade magazine. Its subject was Tina Dupuy, then writing a weekly opinion column syndicated by Cagle Cartoons, whose background as a stand-up comedian had given her op-ed work an unusually sharp comic edge.
Asked what the appeal of a weekly op-ed column was in an age of instant news, Dupuy made a case for the form. The op-ed page, she argued, was one of the last places discourse still had a chance — “not barking heads on TV or snarking heads on blogs” — a space where 700 words could still make an argument to readers who disagreed.
She added that she regularly heard from readers who said they liked her writing and never agreed with her, which she took as proof the op-ed page could still transcend ‘artificial polarization.’
Now
The optimism in that 2011 answer is the part worth sitting with. Dupuy was describing a print op-ed culture — syndicated columns, a shared page, readers who finished an argument they disliked — that has largely been displaced by algorithmic feeds and the very polarization she hoped the form could resist.
Editor & Publisher, the trade magazine that ran the interview, survived a near-death experience: it changed hands more than once and continues to publish, still chronicling the newspaper business it has covered since the early twentieth century.
Tina Dupuy kept writing and reporting, and a few years later moved from commentary to original journalism — most notably a widely discussed first-person account she published during the national reckoning over harassment in politics and media. The 2011 item is a modest artifact: FishbowlLA, a blog that watched the press, briefly watching one of its own.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.