Oh this is journalism at its finest where the serious issues trump fluff -- where substance triumphs over style! Would E. J. Dionne, the Rhodes scholar pundit, ever make it past American Idol? You've exposed yet again the typical inside-the-beltway banal mentality avoiding the serious issues of the day.

I enjoyed the contest. I hope the WashPost does it again next year.

One suggestion is to change the voting. Maybe the judges could pick all but one person who advances to the next round and the readers could select between the bottom two. The social networking aspect will always be there, but I suspect that the two best pundits in this competition were eliminated early because of it. The Post should try to maintain some quality.

Congrats to Huffman. I will read his columns. But Gyamfi and Richtner are the two that I will search for online. I also will miss the commenters. Those of us who actually read the posts had the best sense of who had talent, even if we didn't agree. My favorite part of the competition was the judges' evaluations and the readers who comment. Best of luck to all the contestants.

What fun! Thanks for the invite to submit a piece and for encouraging us to give helpful feedback along the way.

Three tips:

1. How about upping the winner's stint online from three to six months so that the pundit can really build a following and a springboard to the Washington Post or beyond?

2. Although I liked the snappy video Q&A segment I hope you'll drop the post-video critique because we can assess the candidates' performance ourselves.

3. Welcome Americans living abroad to compete so that their unique experiences broaden the dialogue and dimension of the contest.

Thanks for engaging me in a new and meaningful way.

Cheers and Happy Thanksgiving!

Thank you for the entertaining pundit contest. I was there giving each of them grief every week.

I was unclear how important real time video punditry was for this contest. Clearly Zeba given plenty of time and a written format could beat out Kevin, but Kevin was much better in the video and on quick real time responses. I think the video really heavily influenced voting, and if the aim was to find someone who could write thoughtfully, perhaps the format of this contest was not well suited to it.

By far my favorite portion of this competion was the Q&A where you could submit a question, and get it answered by the pundit. Next time I would have specifically asked each of them to respond. This time I put out a question for all of them, and only one addressed it, and the answer was not that satisfying. I think that portion of the competition should force the pundit to respond to the readers, and penalize them if they do not. You could perhaps tinker with the format there to better achieve that result.

I am a bit leary that facebook friends may have had a bit too much influence on this competition. Just as in American Idol where a single pre-teen can text 13,000 times in an evening for their favorite, I wonder if perhaps more of your regular readers were drowned out by new people coming in and piling on to vote for their friends. For instance Maayme Gyamfi went out of the competition too early in my opinion, and Courtney Martin remained in the competition too long, and I suspect a lot of that had to do with social networking skewing the vote. Perhaps restricting the vote to online accounts registered 1 month prior to the competition would give long time readers more of a say.

As far as the Washington Post judges were concerned, the most interesting reviews were of the format citing points gained or lost for certain lines in the columns. This to me was objective, instructive, and fair. Towards the end we started to see stuff like 'bodies of work' being cited as reasons to consider someone like Kevin who floundered on the last essay. If cumulative matters, then assign points to winning legs and add those points up for a cumulative total.

Perhaps the reward of $200 a column is not really enough to motivate talent. Perhaps you need to up the stakes to draw in a really top notch new pundit. It seems to me the price tag of this contest was a bit low, drawing out the unemployed or people with agendas and no real interest in the payout. A prize where you could actually make a living doing this would be better.

Goodness, Mr. Hiatt. This note of thanks sounds like it was written before the event even started, with just the names filled in before publishing.

I posted a few ideas about the contest on a different thread and have several more. But I'd like to hear from WaPo first.

What were your goals, your expectations? What surprised you? What disappointed you? What absolutely has to change if you do this again and what absolutely has to stay the same?

If the readers get honest feedback from the WaPo marketing wizards, bean counters, and editors, then we can better respond to your request for improvement suggestions.

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!

What an interesting way of adding another white man to your ranks. Congratulations.

I read most of the work. I made numerous comments. I followed the contest throughout.
You say that the "winnowing" was left to readers. I doubt that it was. The comment section had "winnowed" to a couple of dozen stalwarts at the most. The very last stage, the final 2 pieces, saw an emergence of new and returning commenters. 8700 votes, far more than at any other stage of the contest; if it was your intent to do a "Dancing with the Stars" event then you probably should have noted that the 3 on-air judges on that show constitute 50% of the final scores. I would suggest that you do something similar in the future. It was written that I was naive in not realizing that social networks would play such a large role. I agree, but I will state again that this was a big opportunity and the result should have been determined by more objective criteria
As far as the stages themselves, I still can't believe that WaPo couldn't have provided more than 7 1/2 minutes of video time. Capehart then criticized the contestants for not engaging with each other...who had time?
Finally, the result. You ended up with a DC local who, IMHO, failed in his last effort. I would have thought there would have been more of an effort to find somebody out there somewhere...Most of us read WaPo in cyberspace because it is the national political paper.
But yes, do it again. That's why I wrote this comment. Thanx

The contest was, is, a great idea. What a wonderful opportunity for those who are great writers but do not have the stage of WaPo to have their views heard.

Anything I say at this point may sound like sour grapes since i was not selected as a finalist. That said I was a bit disappointed in the contest.

First, the initial entry of 400 words is more an exercise in editing than putting together a cogent, engaging piece to wow the audience. The limited size of the initial entry leaves nuance and complexity by the wayside.

Secondly, the critiques by the editorial staff were downright snarky. Take any major Pulitzer columnist, get a three year old column, change the name and see how the judges react.

If you run the contest again I would not give it a whack. Too stilted and it does not add much to the firmament of insight into our society.

The key is to hear from someone who can cut through the fog of words, images and happenings and provide insight that, when looked at with the passage of time, will remain true.