Love gone bad: Endless, joyless foreplay links newspapers and her people

A touching contemporary tribute to the life of a newspapman showed up Monday, via Romenesko.

Mimi Johnson describes her husband Steve Buttry‘s other love — the newspaper business — and the truth in the advice of one of his first editors:

Son, you can love this business with everything you’ve got. Just don’t forget that it is never, ever, going to love you back.

“The people who run newspapers and those who work for them are engaged in useless foreplay,” Johnson writes. “They cling tightly, trying again and again to make the way they’ve always done it still work, but the passion is gone.”

I highly recommend this extraordinary, frank, human look at “the business” and what it’s become. Click here to read it all, and leave Mimi Johnson a comment.