Joel Stein doesn't want to hear from you. At least, that's what the L.A. Times columnist said in a Jan. 2 piece, getting a lot of play on the Internet for bashing the world the Internet hath spawned. I've got the opposite problem: I'm wondering why you don't write me any more.

I am one of those poor slobs Stein writes about who does have his phone number and e-mail at the end of every article I write. It was almost exactly three years ago that I started this gig with the Los Angeles Daily News. If memory serves me well, 2004-05 were good years for hearing from my "fans." I was new to newspaper journalism, and had never gotten much feedback on my articles. The phone was ringing, my account was getting stuffed with reader e-mails, and I was feeling like some minor star on the far edge of the journalism universe. Those were the years when I was flush with feedback. If I would have known it would have gotten so dry right around late 2006, I wouldn't have hit the delete key on all those messages.

I don't get any e-mails from readers any more. Not a "saw your article, it made me think of ...." or a "good job sonny boy on that piece about ...," or even a "you damn liberal news reporters, when are you going to learn that ..."

All I get is resounding silence. And Russian spam e-mails. Tons of them, written in Cyrillic script. My last name is Lithuanian, awkward and Russian-sounding, so it makes me a perfect target for the whirling "spambot" machines, located no doubt in lawless Bulgaria and sending me advertisements for - I have no idea what because I can't read Russian or Ukrainian or whatever language they're written in. The Russian spammers account for about half of my e-mail intake these days, and the rest of it isn't all that sparkling either, mainly just press releases. I don't in any way need Viagra (really I don't,) but at this point I'd be glad to get a Viagra e-mail. At least they'd be speaking my language.

Where are all the cranky readers that used tocontact me about my articles? There was a time when some hick racist who had moved to Utah because he couldn't stand what "L.A. had become" would leave me a moronic, angry voice message about some minority profile I had written. I don't even get that call anymore, let alone a call complimenting me on some article I grinded my fingers down to bone level working on.

I have a few theories about why silence reigns these days in my e-mail and voice mail boxes. Maybe you're too busy downloading podcasts, You Tubing the night away or keeping up with all those chain e-mails criss-crossing the globe. But by all means, put the interact back into interactive and send me an e-mail from time to time.

Legal disclaimer: This blog post in no way is meant to cause hurt feelings to any one who did send me an interesting e-mail in the last six months. If I dwell on the negative, that's because it mainly was negative. But your e-mail was one of the good ones. Joking aside, I especially liked the e-mail I got from a national group of Bid Whist players after I wrote an article mentioning the card game, and an e-mail about my Day Fire article from a woman named Karen who wrote "just keep writing good stories." Thanks Karen, will do.