The phrase "a time when columnists" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when discussing a specific period or event related to columnists, often in the context of journalism or media.
Example: "There was a time when columnists had significant influence over public opinion and political discourse."
Alternatives: "an era in which columnists" or "a period during which columnists".
She wrote a column steeped in reporting at a time when other columnists increasingly focused on attitude, analysis and television appearances, and she did her own legwork well into her 80's.
One reader made a highly pertinent point for the modern Guardian: "At a time when you are shedding columnists and reducing the coverage of the paper, dedicating six pages of the already reduced edition to a football manager, as you have today [9 February], is likely to result in the dwindling number of those prepared to pay for the paper, one of whom I am (for the moment), diminish even further.
In a time when New York newspaper readers were blessed with Red Smith, Jimmy Cannon and Frank Graham as sports columnists, Bill Heinz was as good as, and often better than, any of them.
The columnist Thomas Friedman recommends Gilbert King's Pulitzer Prize-winning "Devil in the Grove": "At a time when we have an African-American president, it is easy to forget just how pervasive and unjust racism was in America only 60 years ago," Friedman said.
David Brooks, a columnist for the New York Times, wrote last week of the Republican leadership: "There comes a time when neutrality and laying low become dishonorable.
With my fellow Forbes columnist Andy Krieger (Forbes, Oct. 20), I predict a much weaker yen and rising U.S. imports from Japan;and more pressure on U.S. profit margins at a time when Wall Street is looking for strong earnings growth.
For many years at around this time, when I was a columnist on a leading British newspaper, my editor would ask me to write an article predicting what was going to happen in the coming year.
"There will come a time soon when many newspapers are not on paper," the columnist Hugo Rifkind wrote in The Times of London.
This is one of those times when I think Newsweek's columnist should reconsider the empirical realities about gays in the entertainment industry vs. his own homosexual issues filter.
Writing in 1998 as a Times columnist, he said Britain was "wrong to abolish hanging" in the 1960s, when the death penalty was outlawed.
