Steven Pearlstein signs off of weekly column

At a party recently, somebody I know came up to tell me he was enjoying my columns more than ever. I thanked this fellow and, hoping to bask a few moments longer in his praise, I asked why.

“They’re more opinionated,” he explained.

He was right, but it was not what I wanted to hear. What I knew was that my sharper pen was hardly the result of a conscious decision to throw off any pretense of objectivity and balance, but more a reflection of a lack of time to do more of the reporting that allows a columnist to add more shades of gray to the black and white of the opinion trade. A good newspaper columnist certainly has to be able to deliver a good zinger every once and a while. Doing it too often not only cheapens the experience but can easily turn into a substitute for fresh insight and reporting.

Last fall, I became a full-time professor at George Mason University. Teaching undergraduates has been fun and rewarding, but it’s proven to be a challenge to do it while also turning out an original, well-reported weekly column. There might have been a time when a columnist wasn’t required to constantly follow the breaking news and nonstop commentary, but in the era of the blog and the 24/7 news cycle, that time has passed.

When this column was launched in 2003, I told myself and my editors that I thought I could sustain it for a decade — that after that, I might succumb to the temptation of writing only about the topics I already know, relying on sources I’ve already come to trust and saying things I’ve already said. My greatest fear was becoming the journalistic equivalent of one of those ballplayers who, as he walks off the field after hitting into a double play, prompts one fan to turn to the other and say, “He was once a fabulous hitter.”

My decade has now come to an end. This will be my last regular column in the Business section. When I get the irresistible urge to comment or let loose a zinger, I’ll be sending it in real time to the Post’s WonkBlog, where Ezra Klein and his crew have put together the best source anywhere for smart, timely analysis of economic policy.

Most of my journalistic focus, however, will be on longer, more magazine-like pieces — profiles, narratives, trend stories and analyses — that will appear about once a month in Sunday Business, Outlook, Style or anywhere else that makes sense in the printed paper and online. Less frequent and more flexible deadlines will make it possible to snoop around for new and less obvious topics — local, national and international — and take the time to report them out and polish the prose. And while they are unlikely to be as opinionated as more recent columns, they’ll still have plenty of voice and attitude. There’s a surplus of opinionating these days; it’s reporting that’s in short supply.

In addition to 10 years as a columnist, this is my 25th year at The Post, almost all of them in the Business section. When I arrived in 1988, Financial, as it was called back then, was still something of a backwater, as it was at most papers. Business, finance and economics were considered, at least by most of the top editors, to be specialized, slightly arcane topics of interest only to a limited number of upper-income male readers. It was a big triumph back then to get one of our stories on the front page. I was helping to edit the section, and in my daily dealings with national, foreign and metro over space and reporters’ time, their attitude was invariably that every story of theirs was more important and more interesting than any story of ours.