There was a time when newspapers stained your hands.

The ink bled into your fingertips, rubbed into your palms; you carried it with you all day, evidence that you'd touched the news and it had touched you.

That ink doesn't smudge any more. These days, most readers find us on phones or tablets, refreshing headlines at red lights or in line at the pharmacy. We're not tossing bundles onto driveways. That part of the business--the press run, the porch toss--has faded. The core is something else now.

We are, or should be, a 24-hour digital destination: timely, thoughtful, alive. A new newspaper every time you click.

Still, I miss the mess.

I've spent 40 years in this business. Not because I thought it noble. I didn't. I thought I'd stay a couple of years, tops. I'd go to law school. Maybe write a novel. But like the Church or the Marines, the news claimed me. It wasn't a calling. It was something harder than that. And more necessary.

I stayed because I found my people: idealists disguised as cynics, romantics with ink-stained knuckles, skeptics who believed in the sharp edge of a sentence. People who argued about headlines like they mattered, because they did. People who stayed late, rewrote ledes, cursed the printer and then showed up the next day ready to do it again.

The work mattered. It still does.

Somewhere along the way--between the........

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