Funny thing happened sometime in the past 18 hours or so. Burlington Free Press deputy editor (and Chief Assistant Gannett Cheerleader) Adam Silverman (a.k.a. @Wej12) blocked me from his Twitter feed.

I guess it was only a matter of time; I smack around the Freeploid pretty regularly, and he’s apparently the touchiest guy in the building. So, what finally broke the camel’s back?

Judging by the chronology, it was a series of replies I made to SilverTweets from the Newspaper Association of America “mediaXchange” conference in Nashville.

(Note the trendy non-traditional capitalization. That’s a sign of a desperate industry seeking new-century relevance. Kind of like when big corporations fill their Tweets with millennial slang like “bae” and “on fleek.”)

Silverman was liveTweeting from conference workshops. I couldn’t help but respond to some of them. First, a harmless jape:

@Wej12 @jeffsonderman There’s a Venn diagram with no overlap.

— theVPO (@theVPO1) March 16, 2015

After that, Silverman sent a couple Tweets I found darkly humorous. First:

@Wej12 @AmPress Ah, so “emotional impact” is a commodity. Nice.

— theVPO (@theVPO1) March 16, 2015

And second:

@Wej12 Ooh, @paulheintz would get a laugh out of that one.

— theVPO (@theVPO1) March 16, 2015

A little background there. The Free Press is notoriously stingy with crediting other news organizations for original stories. Especially when it comes to Seven Days, which the Free Press likes to pretend doesn’t exist.

Anyway, I guess I stepped on some tender toes. Since then, I haven’t seen any Tweets from Silverman and I just discovered I’ve been blocked. So disappointing; I was learning so much from him about the joyless, soulless state of 21st Century Journalism.