Ray Richmond quit his Hollywood Reporter column in December to jump to E! Entertainment Television as director of corporate and trade publicity. Tomorrow he jumps back to THR. He 'splains his change of heart at Cathy Seipp's blog:

It's not anyone's fault at E!. They've actually treated me quite well, despite my complete lack of publicity experience and my being roughly double the age of the average E! employee.

As a director of corporate and trade publicity, my illusion was that I'd have an opportunity to direct something. What fully escaped my consciousness going in was that doing publicity means being, um, a publicist. My natural inclination upon arrival had been to slice up E! programming like so much sushi, not promote it. A capacity to do both simultaneously was unfortunately not part of the job description.

Just why I thought I could make a smooth transition to PR Man after some 28 years as Joe Cynic isn't at all clear. The only explanation I can craft is purely capitalistic. I was lured by the almighty buck, becoming the very definition of a sellout. But as soon as my soul had been snapped up, I became almost obsessively consumed with buying it back.

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