John Tierney became an op-ed columnist for The New York Times last month, taking over the spot made vacant when William Safire retired earlier in the year. Tierney, a Pittsburgh native and graduate of Central Catholic High School, has written for the Times since 1990. His twice-weekly, Washington-based column appears regularly in the Post-Gazette. PG Editor at Large Michael McGough, who has known Tierney since their days at Sacred Heart Elementary School 40 years ago, talked with him about his plans for the column and the challenge of stepping into Safire's shoes.

John Tierney

ANSWER: I guess by writing an utterly conventional column that sounds like every other column out of Washington. That could be the surprise.

Q: Seriously, do you think columnists build up followings by being unpredictable? The other, cynical, view is that columnists become popular because they say the same thing to a niche audience over and over again.

A: There are many schools of column writing, and I know that there is one that says that it's better simply to have a recognizable position so that you become a brand name for a certain position. One veteran columnist told me never to underestimate how much people just love having the obvious thoughts they had at the dinner table repeated back to them.

Q: So that's your charter?

A: It's not. I've always taken a certain pride in setting records for hate mail. Years ago I did this piece questioning recycling that the set the record for negative mail at the New York Times Magazine. So far with the new column I've been getting hundreds of angry e-mails a day. People are saying, How could the Times possibly allow someone as fascist and dumb as you to write a column?

Q: Were those in response to your column criticizing Amtrak?

A: .They're in response to everything -- to Amtrak and to when I said some nice things about Bush's plan for Social Security. There are a large number of people who really dislike Bush and don't like hearing anything positive about him at all.

Q: Those two columns -- Amtrak and Social Security -- seem to conform to your critics' image of you as the capital-L libertarian who's always throwing bombs at liberal orthodoxy. Do you consciously divide up what you do between those columns versus columns that are one-shot pieces about popular culture or things in the news?

A: I do want to write about the political fights in Washington and I'm going to press them from a libertarian perspective. But I really have more fun doing stuff that's not straight politics -- it's about something else altogether. I did a column about a report saying that obesity might not be that harmful and I love writing about the gender battles, I like writing about science, sociology and anthropology. It's more fun to write those, and it's also nice to be able to write about something that doesn't fall on one side of the partisan divide.

Q: How were you selected for this gig? Were there other applicants? Was it like "American Idol"?

A: The publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., approached me years ago after I'd been writing a column in The New York Times Magazine and he urged me to write more often and so I started writing a column on the Metro page. Then they sent me to Washington, and said, "We've got you in mind for this, but we don't know where or when." After Safire retired they decided it was the right time.

Q: Is it really indispensable these days to live in Washington if you're writing a national column? After all, everybody in the country can turn on C-SPAN or log on to political Web sites.

A: I have to tell you that, for a libertarian, Washington is not one's idea of heaven. Before I came here, when I was based in New York for almost 20 years, I had the idea that you could write a national column from anywhere -- and you can. But when I came down here I realized that there's a lot to learn just being around here and soaking it up. Being here and talking to folks who have been here and covered this stuff for decades, you do get a perspective that you don't get otherwise.

Q: Everyone in our business is agonizing about what will happen to journalism because of blogs and the Internet. I don't want to be cruel, but it seems to me that opinion columnists in newspapers are the most vulnerable to incursions from the Internet. If you have 8 million blogs with people expressing their opinions, why would you want to go to the newspaper?

A: There certainly is lots more competition, but it's interesting that on the Times web site the op-ed columnists are usually among the top e-mailed articles of the day. I believe also that our Web pages are among the most visited. The cliche is that there is so much information out there that people are looking for someone to interpret it for them. Now there are plenty of blogs that will do the interpretation for you, but I think that the more sources there are, the more people want to find some common ground.

I was a freelance magazine writer for 10 years and I hated The New York Times because I would spend two months writing what I considered the definitive article on something and put all this effort into it and it would be in a national magazine, and then an article on the subject would be in The New York Times and it would get all this attention because that was the bulletin board people looked at. I think people still want that bulletin board. Also, I've noticed since I started the column that there are many blogs that start debates based on the columns and the old media.

Q: One last thing: Did Safire give you any advice?

A: Yes. He said, "Don't look over your shoulder at me or anyone else." And he said that "for the first six months to a year everyone will hate you and say that you're doing a terrible job. And then after a year they'll say, 'He's found his voice.' You'll be writing the same stuff, but they will have gotten used to you."