Ed McGaffigan, former aide to Sen. Jeff Bingaman, long-serving member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the guy whose endless patience helped me understand, deeply, how government really works, died today.

I will repeat what I wrote in January, when it was clear that Ed was dying:

Reporters depend on the generosity of smart people, people who understand how things work and are willing to spend the time to help us understand it too. In my two decades as a reporter, I can think of only a handful of people as smart, generous and important to my work as Ed.

Nov. 2, 1989, was a strange day for me. It was the last day the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner published. I did a summer at the HerEx back in 1985, as an intern, and I largely hated every minute of it. We were the scrappy second paper to the much larger Los Angeles Times, all “it bleeds, it leads” kind of journalism. I talked a lot that summer to the relatives of people who had just died in some horrible and unexpected ways. Did I mention that I hated every minute of it?

And yet I had lived within it, and I understood something that has come back over me in waves the last 24 hours with the news that the Albuquerque Tribune will likely close its doors before Halloween. The Trib is our hated competitor, and I have growled many mornings at a headline I didn’t like, or a story that had tread on turf I thought that I owned. But every morning of my working life these last 17 years, I have picked up the Tribune to see what they had to say. I have friends who work there, and its pages are filled with the work of people I respect.

But more than that, something ineffable. The Tribune is a newspaper, and a newspaper is a thing alive. I hated that summer working at the Herald Examiner, but the day it finally went under I cried. And then I got in my car and drove to downtown LA, to the loading dock in the back to buy a copy of the final edition.

A TV reporter approached me and asked me why I was buying a copy. I mumbled something that was largely incoherent, because he never bothered to turn on the camera. He was looking for someone buying them in the hope it would be a collectors item, that they could make money off of. I was buying it to get one last piece of something I thought was very, very important – a newspaper.

George and Big Toe

Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck.

I need to clarify something, because there have been a lot of rumors floating around the Internet since the news broke Friday that George Hotz had hacked an iPhone, unlocking it so you can use it with any mobile phone company.

Big Toe and George did in fact meet and spend some time together back in May, as I blogged about at the time. But Big Toe was not part of the team that reverse-engineered the iPhone to enable the unlock. It is true, as I’ve mentioned previously, that Big Toe has spent a great deal of time in China. In addition to his paleontology, BT was part of the team of hackers that reverse-engineered the Chinese Duplex Integrated Multivariate-Software Univac Mime (DIM-SUM) chip. But that was ultimately not part of George’s approach to hacking the iPhone.