Guardian columnist to readers: 'Write me some letters of fucking apology for your disrespect'

For old school journalists and writers struggling to adapt to the brave new world of Journalism 2.0, perhaps the trickiest issue of all is 'reader engagement'.

Many's the old-school hack FleetStreetBlues has witnessed staring at the screen in silent, wordless rage. 'Morons,' they'll finally splutter. 'Idiots. Imbeciles. Total. Utter. W**kers.'

Yes, it's fair to say that not everyone's thrilled about the availability - no, ubiquity - of instant online feedback from the Great Unwashed. The best advice? Don't read the comments, ever. And if you must, you'd better be pretty damn thick-skinned.

Unfortunately, it seems this isn't advice which has ever been offered to art critic and Guardian columnist Jonathan Jones. A keen-eyed reader points us in the direction of a piece he wrote last week, on the somewhat unlikely topic of MI5's uselessly dehumanised crop of the 7/7 bombers picture. It's pretty high-falutin' stuff:

With hindsight, it is an eerily resonant photograph. The flashes of bright colour from the games machines and signs in the background animate it with uneasily strong light. The blurred soft tone adds to the banal everyday quality. Knowing who they are, an artist could turn it into a history painting along the lines of Gerhard Richter's great modern paintings based on photographs of the Baader-Meinhof gang...

...In this picture we actually see Khan and Tanweer as human beings, as if in a portrait – that a hypothetical artist basing a painting on it might even see an analogy with the French 19th century painter Gustav Courbet's portrait of himself meeting a friend on the road, an authoritative study of the moment of meeting and recognition.

But when online readers predictably ripped it to shreds - 'a little absurd' said one, 'a load of bollocks' said another - Jonathan Jones hit back. At first in relatively measured tones - then, not so much.

Why read a newspaper site if you do not want to think? Indeed why read anything at all? 

Go and get the paperback of my book The Lost Battles when it comes out end of March, read it cover to cover, and then write me some letters of fucking apology for your disrespect.

Somehow we suspect the Guardian web team won't be encouraging Jonathan to 'engage with the readers' again any time soon.