They made us think and cry

He could bring the dead to life -- that was the talent of Tom Long, the Globe's longtime obituary writer who walked out these doors for the final time last month.

To hear Long on the phone with a recent widow was like hearing a virtuoso perform in Carnegie Hall: ''I'm so sorry to bother you. . .. I want readers to feel as if they knew him. . . . He sounds like an incredible man." Countless times, his pitch-perfect obituaries were clipped from the newspaper by the relatives of the deceased, tucked inside family Bibles and albums, and preserved for generations to come.

That's what we try to do at the Globe. Many people, maybe most people, think our job is just to write the news, to let people know about congressional votes, jury verdicts, spending decisions, shooting victims, but in fact, in doing that, we try to accomplish a whole lot more.

On our best days, our work brings people together, sometimes with knowledge, other times acrimony, occasionally grief, and often fear. Not enough, we try to inject some humor and, occasionally, perspective. Our everyday goal is to give people something to think about, to worry about, to laugh about, to argue about -- to offer commonality to life in our quirky little corner of the world.

But these days, we'll be doing it with less. Long is one of 33 editorial staff members collectively possessing hundreds of years of newspaper experience to accept a voluntary buyout package, part of what company executives politely call a ''reduction in force." Wall Street has decided that the best way to make newspapers more attractive to readers and advertisers is to cut them. If this fails to make sense, then maybe it doesn't.

As a result, we're about to lose longtime op-ed columnist Tom Oliphant, possessor of perhaps the best Rolodex in Washington, his work filled with sly insight on the ways of the capital.

Gone too will be Jack Thomas, the most elegant writer to grace these pages in a long time. His 1992 account of Boston's skid row -- he lived among the homeless for a wintry week -- should be required reading for every journalism student in America.

The Globe will be losing the wit and wisdom of editorial writer Susan Trausch, the critical eye of Ed Siegel, the storehouse of knowledge of classical music writer Richard Dyer, the clear-eyed photographs of Tom Landers, the intellectual firepower of business columnist Charles Stein. Gone as well will be Renee Graham's delightfully cutting edge riffs on culture, Steve Morse's pointed music reviews, Anthony Flint's wealth of experience in urban planning.

We're losing some great editors, including Peter Accardi, who makes the Letters to the Editor page as balanced as it is; Tina Cassidy, who transformed the Real Estate section; Nick King, who has left a mark on just about every major part of the Globe; Wendy Fox, who turned our Travel section into one of the best in the nation, and Judy Rakowsky, the first staffer in the city room every morning.

There's also the support staff. Expert researcher Bill Boles's work appears every day in every corner of the Globe, though never under his name. Administrator Nancy Sullivan is the person you most want to meet in the hallway. Margaret Murray makes the trains and planes run in Foreign and National with effortless grace and an elegant British accent. There are others, too many others, and that's the saddest part.

So what's left? Fortunately, Pulitzer Prize winners, Nieman fellows, staffers who have been on the front lines of wars, prowled courthouse corridors, ridden malodorous campaign buses, climbed stairs in every neighborhood of Boston. Every one of them is trying to give you something to think about, to talk about, to complain about, a connection in a world desperately in need of it.

Don't believe all this claptrap from moronic money managers about newspapers being a dying industry. Rather, say a word of thanks to the people who helped shape the Globe over the years, and have faith in us that we'll figure out how to change with the times.

Brian McGrory is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at mcgrory@globe.com.