By Maya Trent · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Tina Dupuy on FishbowlLA, March 2011
In late March 2011, FishbowlLA ran a small, self-referential item: its own editor, Tina Dupuy, had been interviewed by Editor & Publisher — the venerable newspaper-trade magazine — about her syndicated weekly column. The original framing was lightly winking, the blog noting one of its own getting press.
Then
Tina Dupuy was, at the time, FishbowlLA’s editor — and also a syndicated newspaper columnist distributed by Cagle Cartoons, a former stand-up comedian who had started a weekly op-ed column in 2010. Editor & Publisher, the long-running trade publication of the American newspaper industry, ran an interview with her, conducted by Rob Tornoe.
The substance of the interview was Dupuy’s case for the op-ed column as a form. In an environment of instant news and saturating analysis, she argued, the opinion column still offered something distinct: a few hundred words to actually make an argument, read even by people inclined to disagree — a space less polarized and less performative than cable shouting or blog snark.
The item was a small, characteristic FishbowlLA artifact — the LA-media blog noting that its own editor had been profiled by the industry’s house organ, a tidy little loop of media covering media.
Now
Tina Dupuy continued as a journalist, columnist, and author in the years after. Editor & Publisher itself went through a near-death experience — the 130-plus-year-old trade title came close to shutting down around 2019 before being acquired and revived under new ownership.
The syndicated-newspaper-column model that Dupuy worked within has contracted sharply across the subsequent decade, as the newspaper industry that carried those columns shrank — fewer papers, fewer opinion pages, fewer column slots. Her argument for the op-ed page as a surviving space for genuine discourse reads now as both prescient and poignant: the opinion section has, if anything, become a more contested and controversy-prone part of the newspaper, repeatedly at the center of newsroom fights over what belongs in print.
The 2011 piece reads now as a small documented moment of media-covering-media — and a snapshot of an argument about the value of the op-ed form, made just as the platform economy was about to reshape where opinion writing lived and how it traveled.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.