It took Jay Mariotti nearly five months to land on his feet. After abruptly quitting the Chicago Sun-Times and declaring that newspapers are "dead," Mariotti finally resurfaced on Monday, beginning his new gig for AOL Fanhouse.

Mariotti's departure from the Sun-Times was rather acrimonious, with his former colleagues taking various parting shots - including Roger Ebert, who advised him: " ... On your way out, don't let the door bang you on the ass."

In his first column for AOL, Mariotti attempted to have the last word. But what particularly struck me in his semi-rant was his utter disdain for the concept of newspaper deadlines:

A week into the Olympics, I was inside The Water Cube That Phelps Built when a voice-mail popped in. It was from the sports editor of the ailing Chicago Sun-Times, asking me to accommodate the newspaper's Paleozoic-era deadlines by doing something the readers wouldn't appreciate. He wanted me to write one column that had Michael Phelps winning that day's race and another column that had him losing. Both would be filed long before the event, which, in some quarters, would be considered an editorial directive to cook up fiction.

I would insert blanks for the finishing times, which a copy editor would fill in, and the bulk would be a lot of jibber-jabber that worked regardless of the result. The editors would decide which column ran based on the outcome. In other words, processed lunch meat for your 50 cents -- and it wasn't the first time. I usually just dealt with these hideous requests. This time, I balked.

Any newspaper writer - particularly those who worked in sports at large metro dailies - can appreciate this. And this indeed has always been a problem: Sacrificing quality for expediency.

When I worked in San Francisco, we had insane deadlines, particularly on Saturdays, with the Sunday paper being distributed throughout Northern California. The first deadline usually came at 7 p.m. for the "Weed Edition" - aptly named for Weed, Calif., one of the places this edition would be printed for.

It wouldn't be unusual for a reporter or a columnist to re-write the same story two or three times, in order to satisfy different deadlines. And sometimes that was done at the expense of the quality of your work, taking away valuable time that could've been spent on the field or in the locker room.

In the Internet age, the deadline concept must be reconsidered if not obliterated. The readers in places like Weed will no longer be satisfied by these plugger stories - they'll just go online instead to find the most complete account of the events. People who live in city centers won't want to spend money to get a paper that has incomplete information just because an event the night before took place on the West Coast, or in another part of the world.

Mariotti is right about this - it's rather liberating:

For the first time I won't have to worry about a third-quarter plugger column or something as inane. I can watch the whole game, a four-hour game, go downstairs [from the press box] and come back up, spend two hours writing and have it appear on a post at 3 in the morning, which is four hours before the newspaper comes. It's the future.

And it's already here.