“After 35 years in journalism, 22 of them with the Hearst Corp. and seven here as the readers’ representative, I am leaving the paper to try my hand at a few projects, to learn new things and to demonstrate to myself, if not to others, that life begins at 62 and that nothing so inconsequential as heart surgery can keep me down,” Dick Rogers writes in today’s Chron.

He also writes: “I long ago lost count of how many telephone calls, e-mails, faxes and letters I exchanged with readers. By late 2003, I was up to 20,000-plus. I began to feel like a one-person focus group, coming to understand that for most topics, there were readers who knew as much as or more than the paper.”