This is not how this column was supposed to have begun.

This column will be my last, so I’d been steadily constructing a great script for it. Or the makings of one, at least.

Here’s (roughly) how it went: This evening (Tuesday, July 13) was the final hours of the final day of fishing for king salmon on Ship Creek.

Even though I live nearby, I missed my chance to fish for kings last year due to the early closure by a state Fish and Game emergency order. I was determined not to let that happen again this year. I was going to go fishing for the sake of the column, if nothing else.

Either I would’ve caught a fish (a small drama in its own right) or spent time meditating on this column during the course of getting skunked (more likely).

Whichever way the fishing went, in due course, the column would’ve found occasion to reveal that the last day of king season also happened to be the first in my life after my twenties; I turned 30 today. That coincidence—in the course of a column about leaving the Press—would lead to obvious and easy metaphors about endings and beginnings and next chapters— the cycle of life, death, rebirth, yadda, yadda, yadda.

The metaphors (not to mention clichés) upon which I would’ve been able to draw would’ve been more or less inexhaustible.

Such symmetry rarely offers itself to columnists, and when it does, it’s about as easy to resist as an open dumpster is to a raven in late winter.

But this evening when the last high tide came and went, I was nowhere near the creek. Instead I spent those hours hunched in front of a computer screen trying to stay caught up on this week’s issue and hunched over a crib singing “Silent Night” (yes, in the middle of July) to a 14-month-old with an ear infection.

As it happens, though, that’s just fine.

Journalism probably shouldn’t hew to any script if it purports to accurately reflect and retell the lives of actual human beings, since those lives themselves rarely unfold according to a script. Certainly my time at the Press has not.

It’s with some reluctance that I set out to write a little about editing this paper for three years and change. I’ve been a firm adherent to an old-fashioned school of thought that shuns self-promotion and gags a little at the sight of journalists pimping their work—as though it couldn’t stand on its own merits.

And I’m equally unimpressed by what seems to be a growing journalist-as-celebrity culture. If you’re holding this paper (or reading it online), you’re probably familiar with the Press. But you’re probably not familiar with me, and that—as far as I’m concerned—is as it should be. You should know enough based on what you’ve read to know our strengths and weaknesses and whether or not we’re worth your read, without knowing anything about me.

Nevertheless, I think it’s good for readers to occasionally hear from behind the curtain about what we’re up to—or what we think we’re up to. Just as a post-game interview with a football coach isn’t always illuminating, mine might not be the most interesting or useful perspective on this paper. But the occasion of my last column seems like a good enough reason to share it. Feel free to indulge me or ignore me.

I started at the Press in early 2007, not long before Nick Coltman, its founder, and Robert Meyerowitz, its most influential editor, departed. The years since have been unkind to journalism of almost all varieties, particularly when it comes to the business side. During the short time I’ve been here the ADN has gone through at least three sets of staff cuts that I can think of offhand, and probably more I’m forgetting. The Press hasn’t been immune either. We lost a full time position in the newsroom and part of another.

But none of that has prevented us from publishing some stories that I’m incredibly proud of.

In 2008, not long after the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Exxon v. Baker, we published an exhaustive piece by Toby Sullivan that ranged from his own experiences as a commercial fisherman to what it was like to sit inside the court 20 years later listening to oral arguments. It ran to 10,000 words—something magazines rarely do these days, let alone newspapers—and it was worth printing every one of those words.

Earlier that year, Casey Grove talked to extreme snowboarders reeling from the death of a colleague in a competition at Alyeska and wrote a tender but truthful account of the inner world of that sport in the aftermath of that death.

Last summer, Eric Lidji gave us the most comprehensive yet easily understood account of the problems related to Cook Inlet’s natural gas supply I believe anyone’s ever written. The head of the Alaska Natural Gas Development Authority emailed it to a laundry list of public officials, and Enstar contacted us for permission to reprint it in mailings to customers.

This whole period has been punctuated by the essays of Rich Chiappone, whose rich humor has been a critical ingredient in an alchemy that turned subjects like squirrels and handmade road signs into cultural maps for early 21st century Alaska. I could go on for quite a while here and still not mention all the stories worth mentioning, but my space is limited.

Do you notice something all these stories have in common?

They all required lots of hard reporting work of one kind or another, but what really made them shine—the reason they stood out in a rapidly swelling sea of what business types call “content”—was the storytelling skills of the storyteller.

This may be old fashioned of me, too, but if there’s one thing I can hope to have preserved during my time with this paper, it’s a space where these long, well-crafted tales can be told.

In an age with a 24-hour news cycle and growing demands for all kinds of reporting, why are stories like this so important? Volumes could be—and have been—written on the subject, so I won’t try to rewrite them. Here’s one good summary, given by Gerard Marzorati, the outgoing editor of the New York Times Magazine, during a lecture he delivered last year:

“…This sort of magazine writing is stuff that the people who do it take very seriously, and they take it seriously for one reason, in the end—to engage you, the reader. The bet is that the narratives they so carefully construct draw you in, get you hooked, get you to identify with people and places, keep you there to the end. Pieces like the ones I’ve briefly described may take up to an hour, or more, for you to finish. They require a lot of you. The payoff is that the facts you learn in the reading of such pieces stay with you, nudge your understanding of the world a little.”

Sitting on my coffee table right now is a book of Chiappone’s stories and essays recently published by a small, independent press based on the East Coast. It contains a handful of those pieces that I mentioned above, pieces published here first. It feels wonderful to be validated in our judgment that Rich’s work is superb, but not nearly so wonderful as it felt to have Rich “nudge our understanding of the world a little,” and to be privileged to participate in such a reflexively transformative process. And what could I write that might capture the deep satisfaction of having a reader tell me that Sullivan’s conclusion in the Exxon piece moved her to tears? How many click-throughs is that worth?

All of this might sound as if it applies only to our cover stories, but those are only the most obvious examples; I believe we’ve succeeded (or failed) to the degree that we’ve applied these principals to everything that we do, whether to a political report or a short box on a visual artist. In fact, I think that even though the Press is uniquely positioned as a storytelling paper, all journalists succeed or fail to the degree that their stories nudge our understanding of the world a little.

I wish I could end this note—and end my tenure here—by telling you that I’m optimistic about the future of journalism, but the truth is that I’m agnostic. I don’t know whether some business model that supports careful reporting and considered storytelling will emerge or whether our options (especially locally, where the stakes are higher in many ways) will slowly devolve into cheaply produced partisan hackery.

But I am optimistic about readers. As long as you’re out there—as long as you have a thirst for that unique experience a well-written, well-reported story can provide, I’m optimistic that someone will figure out a way to provide it to you.

I’ll be joining your ranks as a reader full time in a few weeks. And I hope you’ll join me in being a steady and appreciative, if critical, audience for the best journalism Alaska can deliver.

—Krestia DeGeorge