I landed in Boston - quite literally - just over 30 years ago. At 26, I had flown on my first airplane, compliments of The Boston Globe, which had offered me a tryout on the night copy desk. In the cab headed to the Susse Chalet in Dorchester, wherever that was, the ancient cabbie and I started talking.
"You know how much that place costs?" he asked.
Of course, I didn't know anything then, though I didn't know that either. "Twenty-five bucks a night," he said, all but spitting it out.
He told me his cousin ran a rooming house, and if she charged more than $20 for the week it was too much. Was I interested? The math wasn't difficult: $25 a night versus $20 a week? So we altered course for the South End, wherever that was.
The cousin and I settled on $25 for the week, sheets included, and bathroom down the hall.
By the end of my first day on Morrissey Boulevard, the story was well around the newsroom about the South Carolina bumpkin who was staying in the South End flophouse because he didn't have the good sense to know the Globe would pay for his hotel room. A bumpkin I was. But I knew, too, how to make the best of a good story to get noticed in the crowd. It is a talent that has served me well.
Thirty years later, the South End has blossomed into one of Boston's great neighborhoods. By almost every measure, all of Boston is a better place than I found all those years ago. We sometimes forget that with our incessant carping. But that is who we are - and I am thankful to have been part of it.
"Make love to the city every day," Tom Winship , the great Globe editor, told us on his last visit to the newsroom.
Those are words to live by for any metro daily, more so today than even then. It is not news that the world has changed radically for my business. The wonderful Web has punched a giant hole in the business model of print media just as it has other industries. And no one knows how to fix it. There are more media, more information, than ever before. But for all that media, I see nothing that comes close to replacing the role of the daily newspaper.
Newspapers, in print and online, continue to provide our common language. After a lifetime spent in newsrooms, I believe this as much as I believe anything. Flawed though they are, newspapers are our town common, the place where we meet, learn about one another, and debate what is right and what is not. They amuse us, and they anger us. And to the extent that people opt out of that common conversation, we are the lesser for it.
Nothing is happening at the Globe that is not happening at every newspaper in America. This place remains stuffed with talent, starting with Marty Baron, as good an editor as I have ever known.
But consider for a minute Boston without the Globe. Bernie Law might still be cardinal, and kids might continue to be abused by priests allowed to offend again and again. Whitey Bulger might still be dealing coke and heroin in Southie if the Globe had not outed him as an informant. Fleet Financial may never have understood the real cost of dispatching its voracious "bird dog" lenders into poor neighborhoods. Imagine, quite simply, all that doesn't happen at the State House, at City Hall, and elsewhere because the Globe is watching.
Every day newspapers all across the country, some better than others, provide the kind of common conversation that no amount of blogging can replace in our fractured media world. If there is a substitute for the daily newspaper, I don't see it.
In this new local-local world, Tom Winship's advice is more relevant than ever: Make love to the city every day. Sometimes, though, it is hard not to feel like a faithful old lover who has been taken for granted.
Thank you, my friends. I will miss you.
Steve Bailey is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at bailey@globe.com or at 617-929-2902.
