Giffels: on his privileged career

The goodbye column of David Giffels which was published on page A1 on Sunday was among the top read stories on Ohio.com in the last 24 hours. You may want to click on the headline above to read it for yourself.

Gifflels' farewell, after 14 years at the newspaper, was under these headlines:

Writing for Akron has been a privilege
Beacon Journal newsroom offers vantage point
for historic moments and for personal history.

Perhaps these five graphs best capture the essence of his thoughts:

There have been times like Tuesday, when being in a newsroom has felt like an honor, a unique vantage to history and opportunity to tell it.

This is the room where I witnessed tragedy, on September 11, 2001, when it felt like we were swallowing history whole. And it's the room where we looked out across the massive August 2003 blackout. And where we flirted with something agonizingly close to victory: autumn 1995, when we all believed the Indians were going to grant us the World Series and the team chose instead to keep us in our perpetual state of hard-bitten humility.

On most days, however, the privilege for me has taken place outside the newsroom, as I was set free to explore the world around me, to enter the lives of ordinary people at extraordinary moments, to ask the questions that my neighbors wanted answered, to bring dispatches home from the big events, to wander a shared territory looking for stories to tell.

That's what makes leaving difficult. I've written all my life, but after 14 years at this newspaper, writing has become the act of writing for you, the people who share my hometown and who speak the language of Luigi's and lighter-than-air.

So moving on doesn't mean I'm finished writing about Akron. That would be impossible. Akron remains as rich a subject to me now as it was when I first walked into this newsroom.