After 30 years of daily journalism, 14 of them at The News & Observer, I have departed the newspaper business. (Be still, children. The industry will survive.) I have another novel to finish, freelance work to pursue and a daily online column to write. You can find it at www.gearino.com.

I leave The News & Observer, and the newspaper business itself, with mixed feelings. I never studied journalism -- I was a film major, mostly because I (wrongly) thought that would impress chicks -- and stumbled into the news business with neither forethought nor ambition. But I took to it right away and got pretty good at it.

It's a game for youngsters, though, at least when you work in the trenches where I preferred to be. Recently I'd begun to feel like a professional athlete whose knees have gotten shaky. Maybe the spectators didn't notice, but I knew it was time to leave. I didn't want to become one of those pitiable people who stays in the game too long.

That's one reason I'm departing. (And by the way, I'm not actually all that old. I'm just un-young.) The other reason is that ink-based journalism isn't as much fun as it used to be. For a long time, newspaper owners had a sweet gig: Money rolled in and their papers had a voice-of-God authority. These days, the money is harder to come by, and that authority is under siege. I still believe newspapers are important, but the job of adapting to the new information age needs to be done by people wiser than I. Thus the cracker barrel -- or the 21st century version of it -- beckons.

Thanks for reading all these years. It meant more to me than I can express.

Get $150+ in coupons in every Sunday N&O. Click here for convenient home delivery.