Laurie Garret, longtime science writer for Newsday and among the most widely respected of science journalists, has said farewell to her Newsday colleagues after spending a year in "the most exciting challenge of my life" working with the Council on Foreign Relations while on a leave of absence from the paper.

Garrett left with a lengthy written farewell, posted at Poynteronline, blasting Times Mirror executive Mark Willes' "mandate to destroy" journalism in order to boost corporate dividends.

"The pain of the last year actually began a decade ago," Garrett wrote. "The sad arc of greed has finally hit bottom" with the Times Mirror and Tribune Company now mirroring, in her words, "the general trend in the media world" of stockholders first, Wall Street second, "and somewhere far down the list comes service to newspaper readers."

Saying Newsday's plight is "hardly unique," Garrett wrote that media "have been devoured by massive corporations," fueling a drive for financial gains that "trumps everything that the grunts in the newsrooms consider their missions." She longed for the old days of ink-in-the-veins reporters and wrote that nowadays "all too many journalists seem to mistake scandal monitoring for tenacious investigation."

"This is terrible for democracy," Garrett continued, at the same time urging journalists not to "descend into despair, not only about the state of journalism, but the future of American democracy."

"Giving up is not an option," she wrote, while at the same time giving up on daily journalism herself.

Praising remaining but diminishing remnants of quality journalism at Newsday and some other news organizations, Garrett urged reporters against becoming "paralyzed by rumors, unable to think clearly about the work at hand."

"Rumors only feed fear, and personal fear is rarely stimulus for good journalism," she wrote, urging reporters to "think in imaginative ways." She pointed out that Salon and Slate "have both gone into the black" and said that some overseas reporters and some blogs "are actually quite good and manage to keep politicians on their toes."

"Opportunities for quality journalism are still there," she wrote, "though you may need to scratch new surfaces, open locked doors and nudge a few reticent editors to find them."

Praising Newsday for, in her opinion, having avoided some of the journalistic shortcomings that have beset other dailies, Garrett wrote that the paper's "honor has, by its own accounts, been besmirched by a series of lies committed on the business/advertising/circulation side of the company" and not so much on the news side.

"Make me regret leaving, Guys:" Garrett beseeched her former coworkers. "Turn Newsday into a kick ass paper that I will be begging to return to. Bye for now."

Garrett's letter is online at http://poynter.org/forum/?id=memos.