Two items to file under Don't Quit Your Day Job -- unless (1) it quits you or (2) you're big enough to put it on hold.

First, the case of The Washington Post's Michael Tunison, a news reporter who posts at the Kissing Suzy Kolber blog as Christmas Ape. In a posting earlier this week, he identified himself as such. And he has lost his Post job. The KSK blog is a frequently hilarious, frequently lewd sports-related site (to be clear, this isn't for the kiddies).

Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. told Editor & Publisher: "We don't discuss personnel matters, but we have standards for people's outside work. You need to clear it with your editors here before and it should not be a conflict of interest."

Tunison said in an e-mail to E&P: "There was no conflict of interest between my writing for Kissing Suzy Kolber and my work for The Washington Post. The blog is not a journalistic endeavor and it is not something I was paid for until I revealed my identity. It is a humor blog about the NFL, whereas my job for the paper was to cover local news in a suburban county outside Washington, D.C. It is beat that has nothing to do with a professional football league.

"I also find it troubling that I was summarily fired for engaging in something that is core to the spirit of The Washington Post: full disclosure. Even if editors had a problem with the language used in the blog, they should have been able to respect that my goal was not to defame the Post, but to be forthcoming with my readers."

So now Tunison will be paid to write for KSK.

Speaking of being paid, that brings us to No. 2, the matter of Dan Le Batard.  He is taking a leave of absence from his job as sports columnist for The Miami Herald in order to, according to a memo from the Herald sports editor, "have more balance in his life." Le Batard, a familiar face on ESPN particularly as a guess shouter on Pardon the Interruption, is supposed to come back after a year. But he's a busy guy. The same report cited above lists his other jobs as columnist for ESPN The Magazine, Sunday morning ESPN Radio host and drive-time co-host on a Miami radio station.

So the job that goes is the one that enabled him to get all of those other ones in the first place. As author Robert Andrew Powell puts it: "These guys like Le Batard ... they know that without the imprint of their newspapers, they'd have no substance or credibility -- they wouldn't get the bigger opportunities. Le Batard long ago leapt up to TV and radio gigs -- lucrative gigs -- that make local newspaper column writing seem boring and irrelevant. ... So Le Batard gets the all-important newspaper credibility without doing the work."

Now, before you say I'm just jealous and I would do the same thing if I had the opportunity and talent and work ethic, let me totally agree with you. If someone who hasn't seen my few TV appearances or heard my very occasional radio guest spots -- which should come with warnings about not operating heavy machinery after consuming -- would suddenly want to throw me some money to do a TV or radio job,  I would grab it before that person got fired.

I merely wanted to point out what Powell does -- that though fewer people read newspapers, plying your trade within the medium still carries some weight, even if only to make you appear an expert in other media.

(And, yes, I clearly carry the weight, but I’m no expert.)