Frank Rich is the best newspaper columnist in the business.  Period.  And that has been true for a long time.  Week after week, he has provided facts and insights and connections and a very special kind of intelligence which simply aren’t available anywhere else in The New York Times.

    I hope that Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Andy Rosenthal moved heaven and earth to try to hang on to him.  If they didn’t, they have gravely underestimated Rich’s importance to their readers.   Very few journalists ever manage to make themselves indispensable, but that is exactly what Rich did, starting with his very first year as the newspaper’s drama critic–when FCP wrote him the first of many, many herograms.

    When he switched from drama to politics, it took him a while to find his voice.  Eight-hundred-word columns were not his metier.  But when he followed Arthur Gelb’s suggestion to write once a week at twice that length, he gradually became what he is today: the single most important progressive voice in America.

    His decision to join Adam Moss is not as surprising as it seems.  The two of them have been close collaborators for almost a quarter of a century, ever since Moss commissioned Rich to write a landmark feature about gay culture in Esquire magazine.   This is a triumphant day for Moss, and he deserves gigantic credit for the coup of bringing Rich to New York Magazine.

    Already, media pundits like Jack Shafer are suggesting that Frank Rich without the Times will not be Frank Rich.   That would be true of anyone else on the paper except Frank.  But in a world where the Web is already king, Rich’s move is merely the latest evidence of the long, slow, steady and irreversible decline of print.   His legions of fans will simply bookmark his new location at nymag.com, and Rich will remain just as important as he has been, for more than three decades at the Times.

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