The New York Times Co. says it will post a loss in the third quarter. Print ad revenue's slowing, growth of online ad revenue's slowing, and there's no paywall (yet). More alarming: NYT stars are leaving—for the internet!

Peter Goodman, a prominent economics writer at the NYT, is leaving for the Huffington Post. Of his own free will! No layoffs were involved, apparently! Sure, print journalists have been jumping online for years now, but the NYT has been largely immune from having to guard against such defections, because it's considered such a desirable destination in its own right. That could be changing. He tells Howard Kurtz:

"For me it's a chance to write with a point of view," Goodman says in an interview. "It's sort of the age of the columnist. With the dysfunctional political system, old conventional notions of fairness make it hard to tell readers directly what's going on."

Peter Goodman has discovered what thousands of other writers have already learned: once you taste the freedom to be able to call bullshit bullshit, it's hard to go back to having to coerce some source into saying that thing is "bull [profanity]." The best internet sites now offer an equally huge audience, with refreshing freedom from the more outmoded strictures of journalism. And freedom is the future of this shit, motherfuckers.