There is a characteristically gracious tribute by Roger Ebert in today’s Chicago Sun-Times to the memory of his colleague, counterpart and rival, Gene Siskel, who died ten years ago.

Part of what makes this encomium so affecting and sincere is that Ebert makes no secret of the fact that he and Siskel fought constantly and pretty much hated each other, though they genuinely loved and respected each other as well. They were like ill-matched brothers.

I was a witness to the “hate” half of the equation, having taken a couple of classes from Ebert in the early 80s, one of them on the films of Hitchcock and his imitators, and the other devoted entirely to profoundly esoteric and unclassifiable movies that Ebert was smart enough, and brave enough, to champion. During the classes, during the breaks, and even once while he and I were at adjacent urinals, Ebert compulsively uttered nasty but very funny cracks about Siskel that struck at the very core of Siskel’s personality and his predilections.

Ebert rarely alluded to what I suspect was his real objection to Siskel: While the two of them were for many years yoked together in the public eye as the pair of bickering film critics on their TV show “At the Movies,” there was nothing symmetrical about the relationship whatsoever. And I don’t just mean this in the clichéd sense that Ebert was “the fat one” and Siskel was “the skinny one.”

Ebert was, and remains, one of the best short-form essayists in America today, on any subject. The quality of his movie reviews over the years — written, remember, on a very strict deadline and in response to movies that are, in a few cases, literally beneath comment — has been close to miraculous.

Siskel, on the other hand, was a terrible writer. I used to know a Chicago Tribune reporter who would say, “you think his stuff is bad? You should see it before the editors get ahold of it.”

Siskel came across as a bit dimwitted, as well; I once saw him on stage with the director William Friedkin, introducing one of Friedkin’s films, and witnessing the two spar with each other about the movies was as painful and perversely entertaining as watching Don Knotts go a couple of rounds with Joe Frazier. When he delivered brief movie reviews on the local news, there was one newscaster who used to delight in flummoxing Siskel in the brief “happy talk” interregnum after Siskel’s report and before the commercial; Siskel’s responses were inevitably late, and lame.

I’m not stressing this point in order to disrespect Siskel’s memory, but rather to do my small part in decoupling his reputation from that of the vastly superior Ebert, who, despite a series of serious health problems that have rendered him mute, continues to write wonderfully.

At the same time, I should point out that, with all of his faults, Siskel was legendarily hard-working and ambitious and, even more important, clearly loved the movies. Given a prominent public platform, he communicated that love, however imperfectly, to a much wider audience than any Internet-only critic that I’m aware of.

It’s frustrating to me sometimes, as a writer, to see how little we appreciate our journalists. Journalism, as a serious profession, may well be dying, and the lack of energy and near-acquiescence with which journalists and readers alike have greeted this prospect has been appalling.

My previous post on this issue may have left the impression that I’m concerned only about print journalism, and while it is true that I am unashamedly a lover of print, the fact is that creeping digitization represents just as much of a threat to television news.

This may seem less alarming to many, given the remarkably poor quality of network and local news broadcasts. I virtually never watch either. But professional journalists of all types have an incredibly important job, and society is much better off when there is spirited competition among competing TV stations and print outlets, and among bloggers as well, as part of an information ecosystem. If and when print and television journalism disappears entirely and only unpaid bloggers and other online commentators are left, that ecosystem will be very barren, indeed.

(I suppose I’ll feel better about the prospects of an all-online future when the blogosphere begins to produce journalists who are paid for their efforts and/or write as consistently well as Ebert.)

Coincidentally, the same issue of the Sun-Times that contained the Siskel tribute also contained a brief report about another professional journalist here in Chicago who has departed the scene, though thankfully not in the permanent sense. Amy Jacobson was an on-air reporter for the local NBC station who was fired in the wake of her videotaped appearance, while wearing a two-piece bathing suit and while in the company of her own children, at the house of a man whose wife had mysteriously disappeared. Today’s news was that a Cook County judge had ruled that Jacobson’s defamation suit against a rival TV station for airing the videotape could proceed.

And good for her. The entire so-called scandal had always struck me as being badly overblown. She had been covering the missing-wife story from the beginning, and stated (and I believed) that she was on her way to a swimming pool with her kids when she was alerted to an opportunity to mingle with the missing woman’s husband and relatives and perhaps get a scoop. There were no allegations that she was engaged in any kind of improper personal relationship with the husband. Her greatest sin, other than daring to be attired casually, seemed to have been an excess of ambition.

But ever since then, she has been unable to find another television job, and her reputation has been besmirched. To add to her travails, her husband divorced her.

I happen to have known Amy Jacobson about 12 years ago, back when my wife and I and our then-infant daughter were living in a condo about a block from Wrigley Field and Amy was our upstairs neighbor. She would chat with my wife and me in our back yard, and she would attend our condo board meetings. I even went to a couple of parties at her apartment, though anyone who knows me well won’t be surprised to hear that I didn’t last long. And she would on occasion engage in the kind of babbling baby-talk with our daughter that babies always seem to encourage in even the chilliest and most distant of adults.

But Amy wasn’t like that at all.

To this day, I remember her as being one of the most genuinely warm and down-to-earth persons I’ve ever known. Maybe this was just one of those tricks she’d cultivated as a reporter, to make every person she spoke to feel as if she really cared about what they had to say.

But I don’t think so. I think she really cared.

And yet, reading some news reports about her travails, one might get the impression that she was some kind of ultra-competitive, heartless harpy. I know very little about the legal merits of her case, but I do know that her on-camera demeanor struck me as unfailingly professional. It didn’t hurt, as well, that she was one of those women who just light up the screen. Her fate strikes me, as it has a few other commentators in Chicago, as being terribly unjust.

But the point is not my personal regard for Amy Jacobson. The point is, how many online journalists in the future will be willing to accept the kind of calumny that she has had to deal with in pursuit of a story, when they get neither pay, nor hope of a future paycheck, in exchange (unless online publications somehow figure out how to get readers to pay for content)?

And, for that matter, would we even care about the manner in which a blogger chose to cover a story? When there is no professional (which is to say, paid) journalism, there are no professional standards. Granted that these standards were in my opinion unfairly applied to Amy Jacobson, but at least there appeared to be an effort to protect the station’s and the public’s interests.

And when there are no standards, however imperfectly applied those standards might be, then there is no trust.

There are great writers, like Roger Ebert, and aggressive reporters, like Amy Jacobson, and enthusiastic advocates, like Gene Siskel. But whatever sets them apart, they all have something in common: They all are, or were, professionals who loved what they did and added to, rather than detracted from, public discourse.

For all its tendentiousness, manipulativeness, arrogance, and inability to accept stray facts that don’t fit into its preconceived notions of a story, the mainstream media, and the dwindling band of journalists who maintain it, perform an indispensable service. It’s a service that too many of us will likely fully appreciate only when they are, all of them, gone, with nobody left to write their epitaph.

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