Today was officially Jay Mariotti Week. Sure, Barack Obama had a pretty big week, but in the sports world, the past five days have been all about Mariotti. (Coincidentally, what sparked the Mariotti resignation was a column about Obama, proving that you can’t escape Obama’s influence no matter how intellectually insulated you are.)

First, we learned of Mariotti’s resignation. Then we learned why Jay was resigning — he considered Chicago a market that “doesn’t compete,” whatever that means, and that he wanted to write for “Web sites” based on what he observed at the Olympics in Beijing. Jay, internet crusader, didn’t want to be on the Titanic when the ship went down.

The notion that it took Mariotti a trip to Beijing — in 2008 — to realize that the Internet was challenging newsprint seemed either incredibly naive or false or both. So it was only a little longer until we found out that the resignation was over the aforementioned Obama spat — Mariotti wanted to write about Obama, so did fellow Sun-Times columnist Rick Telander, and when Mariotti didn’t get his way he sent a two-word e-mail to the Sun-Times editor: “I quit.” Nice.

In the meantime, we’ve learned even more about how much everyone really hates Jay Mariotti. From former colleagues like Chris De Luca — who never seemed so eager to diss Mariotti before — to Rick Telander’s verbal hallelujahs in the Chicago Reader to editor Michael Cooke’s hamfisted statement to Roger Ebert’s scathing takedown yesterday, Mariotti was harangued by anyone who ever had anything to do with sports journalism in Chicago. It was a bloodbath. (Jerry Reinsdorf let us know his thoughts, too.)

So Mariotti is gone. Most fans already knew everything they needed to know about Mariotti from his columns — that he was bitter, divisive, joyless and, more than anything, relished in the attention of negativity. He bathed in it. It sustained him. No surprise, then, that his colleagues felt that negativity and petulance even more acutely.

Mariotti leaves two legacies, and both prove two things about newspapers. The first is that his style of column-writing — bombast for bombast’s sake, anger, strongly-worded screeds against invisibile enemies — works. It works in the sense that it gets people to read regardless of motivation. As media becomes even more crowded, and the voices of newspaper columnists are slowly drowned out by a chorus of bloggers and tweeters and TV screamers, Mariotti’s style is increasingly looking like a last resort. Why be right if you can be interesting?

The second is that at their core, they’re a business. This should of course be obvious to anyone who has every picked up a newspaper, but so often, journalists (myself included) get drunk on their own Kool Aid. Ethics and honesty are important, sure, but newspapers are ready and willing to sacrifice that sort of thing as long as someone like Mariotti keeps pulling in the eyeballs. Of course, the minute Mariotti left, his former colleagues had a field day, but where was this opposition before Mariotti signed his latest contract? Where was it when he flip-flopped all over the White Sox’ 2005 season? Where was this before? If you hated him so much, why did you employ him?

No longer a cash cow, the Sun-Times made Jay Mariotti a sacrificial lamb, but not before one final grasp at publicity. That tells you just as much about Sun-Times as it does about its former columnist.