As columnist, comment editor and news editor, he was "popular, personable, unflappable".
Yet these feedback loops also threaten a correspondent's ability to bring home the juiciest meat, as Nicholas D. Kristof, another correspondent-turned-columnist, commented by e-mail.
Sarah Vine, the Daily Mail columnist, commented on a friend's Facebook status to warn of what life would be like if Labour was to form a minority government propped up by the SNP.
In Haaretz, a leading Israeli newspaper, on Monday, a columnist commented, "When you look at pictures from Iraq and pictures from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, it is sometimes hard to discern differences between them".
As Ari Shavit, a columnist, commented in the newspaper Haaretz on Thursday, the Shalit deal "erodes Israel's deterrence" and "will weaken Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, flood the territories with skilled terrorists and lead to chaos".
The chorus dancer Marie Blanche was his co-star, a partnership that caused the gossip columnists to comment on the performers' alleged romance two years previously.
But papers called in designers and celebrity columnists to comment, not on her plans for equal opportunity policies, but on her dress sense.
As the much-syndicated columnist Bob Greene comments: 'Certainly, he has not led a life that would be a cause for such ridicule.
"It raises in such wonderfully stark terms what freedom is and what one does with it," said Jonny Steinberg, an author and one of the many newspaper columnists who commented on the events.
The New York Times' columnist's comments echoed ones he made in a Times Magazine piece last week titled "Earth to Ben Bernanke".
