I'll admit it: that big weekend for tele-mourning - Di buried, Mother Teresa checks out - did not weigh me down. A footnote to Teresa's death, in fact, gave me an odd lift. This was the discovery that a couple of journalists I admire had worked for her. Scott Simon, NPR's thoughtful Saturday-morning host, was one. I called him for some details: "It was 1984, and I had been a journalist for some time by then," he told me. "I was in India for NPR, a correspondent. Went to do the inevitable story on the hospice for the dying. We talked to people who were dying. I just felt moved to volunteer there. It was really as simple as that." Simon worked for three months. "I bathed people, I fed people, I moved around tables, I lifted sacks." Then back to work on the radio. The afternoon we talked he was preparing to interview the inventor of a "robotic sniffer."

Jason DeParle, who covers welfare reform for The New York Times, was the other one: "It was 1981. I wrote a letter to Mother Teresa. I got a letter back from somebody named Brother Anton who said the work is simple: we clip nails, give food. He warned that it was physically uncomfortable." It was worse than uncomfortable in the beginning, because DeParle's first assignment was in a horrific mental institution. He later served in Teresa's hospice in Kalighat. "Conditions were still, by American medical standards, crude, but it was something worthwhile. You were taking a dirty and rat-bitten kid and turning him into a clean and bandaged one." DeParle kept a journal, the journal turned into a long article that got published in a college magazine, the article seeded a career in journalism.

Why these tales lifted me, I think, is that they are molecules of affirmation of some connection between journalism and generosity. It's not that journalists are selfless, God knows, or that they need a tour of duty in Calcutta. But the best of them, the ones you remember the day after next, tend to be people who want to fix the world. They run on the usual fuel mix - ambition, curiosity, anger, whatever - but like the best cops or doctors, the best journalists also have a strong urge to make things better, to heal some wounds and wound some heels. This is not discussed. It might be considered naive by the wise sophisticates. But at a time when journalism's worst qualities are paraded and discussed everywhere, why be embarrassed about this one?

 It's a quality that's rightly tempered by journalism's neutral-observer role, of course. For DeParle, that was bothersome at first, and at one point he took a break from reporting, thinking medical school. "I thought I would do something as opposed to writing about things other people were doing. I went to the Philippines and was supposed to work with a nun at a squatter camp, but the situation fell apart. I started keeping a journal again. It was an attempt to get away from journalism but the whole thing reverted to journalism. I decided, well, that's what I am interested in. It isn't devoid of social utility."

 When he was at The Times-Picayune in New Orleans, DeParle wrote a series on public hospitals. "I had a romantic view of the emergency-room doctors. They were taking these wounded bodies and fixing them up. They, in turn, had an overly romantic view of what I did. They said to me, 'Well, you can affect legislation.' They thought that I had the power and I thought that they had the power to actually make a difference.

 "In the Philippines I had time to think about that. And what I decided was: maybe Mother Teresa lives her life trying to maximize her social utility, but I didn't and I don't. I stopped trying to figure out whether it was better to be a doctor or a journalist. The world needs doctors and it needs journalists."

 Well, good ones. The quality I'm trying to describe determines what it is that we tend to observe. Journalists like DeParle and Simon are not the sort to spend their First Amendment currency laboring to tease out the sexual orientation of a movie star, ö la Esquire, or yipping after the next Marv Albert, or otherwise adding to a gathering flood of drivel. One of the more dispiriting things a journalist ever told me - this was a thirty-ish reporter at The Philadelphia Inquirer - was that at her newspaper each generation of reporters and editors seems less interested in substance and more interested in the arc of career. Less generous, in a way.

 I don't really buy her theory. A side job I have here at Columbia is marching a handful of students through a magazine-length piece each over a school year. The kids are busy, very stressed, yet I marvel at the complexity and seriousness of the subjects that the better ones among them tend to pick. Over the summer I had five. One found a mother and daughter serving time in the same prison and struggling from behind bars to keep the daughter's young family together; another brought to life a statistic, a smoker dying of lung cancer; a third tried to unravel a meltdown at a suburban high school where the dropout rate had gone through the roof; another wrestled with the failure of New Jersey, where Megan's Law was born, to seriously treat imprisoned sex offenders, who sooner or later will be somebody's neighbors again. The last was about former baseball players who got to step up to the plate in the majors just once or twice, a story that was more fun than pedophiles, although it ultimately was a serious inquirinto how men deal with unfulfilled dreams.

One student - a compelling writer and a dogged reporter - asked me in an moment of insecurity whether I thought she would ever find a corner in today's media world to do the kind of work she wants to do, which is to dive into some of the knottiest problems society has to offer and write lively and clearly and at some length about them. I told her yes you will. That's my leap of faith.

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