Losing your voice

Respected as one of the best political reporters in San Diego County before he became one of the better newspaper columnists in the country, Gerry Braun walked into work this morning and notified his bosses at The San Diego Union-Tribune that he was leaving. Immediately. He wasn't taking a buyout, he was taking the initiative. He had a new job with the Mayor's office. Because of the inherent conflict with his column, Gerry left immediately.

When Gerry walked out out of the newsroom, the Union-Tribune lost its voice.

I've known Gerry for nearly three decades. One of my favorite Gerry memories came when he was covering the 1982 election in the old 43rd Congressional District that spread across northern San Diego County and into southern Orange County. The frontrunner in that race was Johnnie Crean, the privileged son - some would call him the spoiled rich kid - of John C. Crean, founder of Fleetwood Enterprises, one of the larger manufacturers of mobile and motor homes in the country.

Gerry was working for a small daily, the old Times-Advocate, and was given a generous amount of time - considering the size of the paper - to profile Mr. Crean. After several days of working on this project, Gerry confessed he had nothing to show for it but a classic case of writer's block.

He took care of the problem by going to Dodger Stadium. Some 100 miles to the north.

Whether Gerry was pulling our leg or not when he went to L.A., I don't know for sure. He is, after all, a pretty good poker player. But the story often motivated me when I was stuck on a story on which I had too much time to report, and Major League Baseball profited from it. If it worked for Gerry, I told myself, it could work for me.

That's because what came of Gerry's big adventure was one of the better profiles ever published in the small Escondido daily, which at the time was chock full of talented writers.

Gerry's writing only got better, and reporters often sought his advice on how to phrase a story even after he left his job as a writing coach and became a metro columnist in the spring of 2007.

Over the past 18 months, Gerry took pride in siding with the underdog. He wrote about a airlines treating their passengers like dirt and politicians taking people for granted. He wrote about developers and their ridiculous projects. And he wrote about people losing their jobs to new technology.

Not long ago, Gerry wrote about a mapmaker who was going out of business, no longer needed in a world of GPS devices and online services such as MapQuest and Google Earth.

Perhaps now we're suffering the same fate. After three recent rounds of buyouts and one round of layoffs, we're losing our soul.

Now that Gerry's gone, we've lost our voice.