Ah, the wonders of newspaper rivalries in the age of online media.

Regina Hackett, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's art critic, cast a critical eye on her departing counterpart, Sheila Farr of The Seattle Times, in a blistering blog post Monday afternoon on the P-I's site. By this morning, the post had disappeared.

It was the kind of commentary that probably wouldn't have made it into a traditional print edition. But as blogging spreads through the mainstream media, one result is a reduction in the editorial layers between journalist and audience.

[See update below with an explanation from Hackett, who says she decided to remove the post after it was published.]

Hackett's post was titled, "Seattle Times art critic signs off. When was she on?"

"Suffice to say she's the opposite of James Brown, the hardest working man in show business," Hackett wrote about Farr. "What did she accomplish? By doing so little, she tanked her job. The decline of newspapers can't be news to anybody who works at one. She performed as if we were in the old days, when jobs were a given. She turned her position into fat, and the Seattle Times is on a diet."

The post went on to quote from a Sunday farewell piece in which Farr wrote that she was less inclined to daily newspaper writing than to "research, contemplation and working my way to the core of things."

Wrote Hackett: "The core of things? Where is the review of hers that gets to the core of things? I want to be gracious here but can't. She failed her newspaper, the arts community and readers. Now there's an official hole where her unofficial hole used to be."

Although the post no longer appears on Hackett's Art to Go blog, it's still visible in Google's cache.

The separately owned Times and P-I share business functions under a joint operating agreement but maintain independent editorial operations. We've left messages with Hackett, our former P-I colleague, to find out what happened, and we'll update this post depending on her response. Farr was no longer reachable via the Seattle Times newsroom.

Update: Hackett says she decided to remove the post, but she plans to republish a revised version.

"I took it down because I thought it was, upon reflection, a little mean, and I don't want to be mean," she said. "These are tough times in the industry."