As crushing as the revelation was this week that the (now-former) New York governor is also "Client No. 9" in a busted online prostitution ring, about as devastating was news that Steve Bailey is leaving the Globe.
Bailey's been a reporter and business columnist there for decades. In the two-plus years since I started reading the paper daily, he's been the only must-read ever single time he publishes something. (Wednesdays and Fridays, for the uninitiated.) His writing is witty, tight and fearless; his reporting accurate, thorough and impeccably sourced. The overall themes in his columns are humble: All he wants is a government and business community that's transparent, honest, intelligent and hard-working. Sounds so simple and deserved for all of us, and yet, as his columns always show, it's so hard to achieve.
I suppose it's not terribly surprising he's leaving. He's branched out to other media -- he's the best segment on an otherwise terrible radio show and also appears weekly on NECN -- and apparently, his wife is French and would like to live closer to home. (He's taking a spot in Bloomberg News' London bureau.) But come April, when his column no longer appears, it'll be tough to bear. As a young Boston-area reporter, there's no one whose career I would rather emulate.
As for Spitzer, the best analysis I've seen on it is the New Republic's comparison of him to Roth's Portnoy. It comes from Noam Scheiber, which I guess just proves it takes a Jewish boy to know a Jewish boy.
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