And yet… today's columnists – me included – have come to expect that every time they write a column it'll be forever available to anyone with a web browser; permanently adding to the long tail of their (urk) "personal brand".
The columnist called me for a reaction, and I had to correct Ms. O'Donnell.
"He has to turn elsewhere to make his investments," a Mexican columnist told me.
"Politics was a strange career choice for Obama, David Frumm, a conservative columnist, told me.
As Mahmood Sabbagh, a popular newspaper columnist, told me, "People were more joking than concerned about them".
"When a system implodes from inside, no bomb can save it," Amir Mohebbian, a conservative Tehran columnist, told me.
Win or lose, Makokha, the columnist, told me, Mwangi's candidacy is important.
"The thing about Augusta is, it's not just another golf club," said David Israel, who was a sports columnist with me at The Washington Star.
As Michael Musto, the New York Village Voice's entertainment columnist tells me: "A flop of this magnitude is just too delicious".
"Tonight, all the political programmes on TV are about football," Ezequiel Fernandez Moores, Argentina's leading sports columnist, tells me from Buenos Aires.
