For most all of my professional life I have been either a newspaper reporter  and editor or a bookseller, as proprietor  of a used book store.

And for much of that time, I have lived and worked in the Northampton/Florence  community, in the process  putting down deep roots and acquiring a background in the issues and personalities of this area.

  From 1971 to 1986, I was editor of Northampton's  newspaper, the Daily Hampshire Gazette. In those days, the paper had a reputation for being aggressive in its news coverage, which did not always win favor in some quarters of the community. For many years, some of them when I was no longer at the newspaper, I wrote a column that attempted to sort out issues and events—some local, some larger—in the context of my own and others' daily lives.

Before joining the Gazette and after leaving it, I worked as a

reporter  and editor at the Berkshire Eagle, Congressional Quarterly, the Winston Salem Journal, the Detroit Free Press, the Quincy Patriot Ledger and the Torrington Register Citizen.

Journalism and public service were linked in my mind, an old-fashioned and hardly popular view these days when the two most reviled professions are elected politics and the media.

The media, in an effort to shed its negative image has become excessively willing to overlook the difficult, controversial story for the easy trivial piece. I still believe the public wants more, not less, from its media. I know I do.

Between 1990 and 2004, I operated Bookends, a used bookstore on Maple Street in Florence, which is now owned and operated by Grey Angell. In a way, bookselling is a kind of editing too—selecting books that have long-term merit;  books that are of the moment, but whose time passes; books for pleasure and diversion; for study and illumination.

 For the last six years, I have been posting on downstreet.net stories about local issues, commentary on local events and personalities and opinion that draws on my long experience in the community as well as my training and background  as a newspaper reporter and editor. Downstreet.net seeks to stray from the well-trod path to make  connections that provide another voice and perspective on life in Northampton.

Edward Shanahan

Editor, downstreet.net