On May 24, 2024, Chicago Tribune syndicated advice columnist Amy Dickinson shocked readers (and myself) by announcing her retirement and her plan to cease her syndicated “Ask Amy” advice column.
“Dear Readers: After 21 years writing the ‘Ask Amy’ column, I’m announcing that I’m leaving this space. My final column will run at the end of June. I’m healthy, happy, and 64 years old. This is a decision I’ve been wrestling with for more than a year.”
In addition to this passage included in her Tribune Media Content syndicated column, a later paragraph ended with her explaining who would be assuming the Tribune’s syndicated advice columnist role: “I’m delighted to make way for your newest advice-giver: R. Eric Thomas, whose ‘Asking Eric’ column will continue to foster the engaging relationship we’ve shared. Eric is young, smart, and a talented advice-giver – formerly of the Dear Prudence column.”
Dickinson’s final “Ask Amy” column was published on June 30, and beginning July 1, the “Asking Eric” column began as the new advice anchor.
I’ve been in the newspaper field for three decades, with a tenure long enough to recall when I wrote a column to introduce the “Ask Amy” column to readers when it first launched. At the time, Chicago Tribune editors dubbed Dickinson as “Ann Landers’ successor,” a mantle which Dickinson has always distanced herself from in favor of finding her own readership audience.
Over the decades, in addition to writing about Landers’ death at age 83 in June 2002, and later the death of her twin sister-turned-rival syndicated advice columnist Abigail Van Buren, aka “Dear Abby,” at age 94 in 2013, I’ve always kept my eye on the ever-competitive (and oftentimes caustic!) shrinking career pool of the coveted advice columnist occupation.
With Landers’ death in 2002, just as she had always explained would happen in interviews, the Ann Landers byline departed with her. Her only child, daughter Margo Howard, began her own advice column originally called Ask Prudence for Slate magazine until 2006, when she signed with her mother’s former syndication company, Creators Syndicate, and began to write the advice column Dear Margo until she retired it in 2013 on her 73rd birthday.
I was somewhat surprised that Dickinson in her final column, which included final paragraphs listing names to thank, made no mention of the late Landers. But of course, Dickinson and Landers’ daughter Margo Howard have had some shaky media moments during the past two decades.
In February 2009, Margo penned “an open letter” to Amy Dickinson accusing her of exploiting her late mother and the 46-year history of the “Ann Landers” advice penname.
Margo said she took exception to Amy “allowing people, if not encouraging them to consider her (Amy) as the new Ann Landers,” including during appearances on “Good Morning America” and “The View.”
“Well, you are not the new Ann Landers because there is no ‘new’ Ann Landers,” Margo explained.
“It is a copyrighted name and trademark, and what that means is that no one else can use it — not to write under, and not to promote themselves.”
Margo concluded with: “By law, the only person who would have been able to become ‘the new Ann Landers’ was me. And that was nothing I chose to do. You see, dear, even I knew that there could only be one Ann Landers.”
Dickinson, whose bio in the past has included the fun fact that she is “a distant relative of the poet Emily Dickinson” (Amy also named her only child Emily), only countered Margo’s claims by explaining that she had no control over how others introduced her, including references that might include the late Ann Landers.
It’s ironic that this latest advice columnist Eric Thomas has a writing history that included a stint writing under the Dear Prudence penname for Slate Magazine, the same column feature launched by Margo Howard in 2006.
As for Amy Dickinson, she has also had her own high-maintenance moments, one of which I chronicled and followed in this column back in August 2016 when the “Ask Amy” advice column disappeared from the pages of her flagship Chicago Tribune, as well as The Post-Tribune and all of the other Chicago Tribune suburban newspapers for more than a month, beginning July 14, 2016, during a contractual dispute.
A cryptic editorial note next to the Ask Amy column signature (but sans column) simply stated: “The Ask Amy column is on hiatus.” However, her columns continued to appear in syndication around the country in more than 200 other newspapers, fulfilling her syndicated contractual obligation to those clients.
Once the Ask Amy column returned to the Chicago Tribune and the subsidiary suburban publications, it carried a new disclaimer that the Ask Amy column was now under the copywrite and ownership of Amy Dickinson rather than the previous tagline which had read: Copywrite Tribune Media Content.
Philip Potempa is a journalist, published author and the director of marketing at Theatre at the Center. He can be reached at pmpotempa@comhs.org.