Gazing at the football games yesterday, lying on the couch between a rough weekend and a busy week, my mind erred on the side of darkness, more happily entertained visitors dressed in black.

To wit:

As I make the transition all of us writers are making—fewer of my words appear in print, more of my them appear online only—I do feel I'm moving from oil painting on canvas to chalk-drawing on the sidewalk, from writing to something more like talk radio.

I can't help but feel that my words, however unlikely they ever were to be read 100 years from now, are even less likely to reach into the future now.

The compensation for this impermanence is immediate reaction: At the new Ragan.com web site, the stories now have comment capacity. So each story I write is like a blog entry—a statement, but also potentially, the beginning of a good conversation.

Which is cool.

Except the moment Ragan turned this feature on and I got the first long electronic response to a story of mine my first thought was, "Oh no. Maybe I've gotten my last Letter to the Editor."

The Letter to the Editor was better, more flattering, more exciting than an online comment. Because it took the writer time to create and required some measure of consideration to send. Why? Because it might appear in print! But a quick, hotheaded electronic comment? Not that big a deal. ...

Letters to the editor are also a sign of the publisher's open-mindedness. With a letters page, the publisher is not only saying it is willing to give you a forum to shout, it's saying, "We're so glad to get your point of view that we're going to lovingly edit it and spend our money on ink and paper in order to place it with a proportionately chosen group of other views (the dumb ones of which we have eliminated)."

A lively string of readers' comments on an online article? That's good, and if the article is timely, it's probably more socially useful that a Letter to the Editor a week or a month from now.

But for a symbol of civilized discourse, online comments are no Letters to the Editor section, and they never will be.

Readers, do you share these feelings or am I being what Shel Holtz has always said I am, "The world's youngest curmudgeon"?