THE NEWSPAPER profession is a rewarding one. When I arrived at The Chronicle in 1974 after graduating from the University of Georgia, my first inclination was to pay the publisher for the exciting opportunity to have an editorial soapbox to talk to the world. What a rare thing for an idealistic 23-year-old.

The early years, especially, offered a great opportunity to travel and interview the captains and kings of our two-state area, the nation and the world. Publisher Billy Morris told me that if I was going to write intelligently about important foreign countries and issues, I should travel abroad and soak up information that could never be obtained by mere reading. For providing that opportunity and many others over the past three decades, I will always be grateful to Billy Morris and his family.

I have also been greatly helped along the journalistic road by my wife Bonnie (an Augusta native) and other valuable advisers, especially one-time Morris Communications Vice President Ed Skinner and attorneys David Hudson and Mike Carlson.

I learned a lot more about how the national government really works, and about true public service, during a brief 1981-82 break from Augusta when I moved to Washington to serve as an aide to a true statesman - U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C.

I have thought about - given one last Sunday atop The Chronicle soapbox - what message or reflections I'd like to leave readers. Part of me wanted to pontificate about some of my pet political subjects. Another part wanted to go out with guns blazing on the subject of Augusta and its red-hot politics. Permit me, instead, to reflect on journalism and the new soapbox I'll be mounting for a public interest organization that champions limited constitutional government and free enterprise.

One of my favorite quotes - and perhaps a personal motto of sorts - is this gem from President Teddy Roosevelt:

``Far better it is to dare mighty things ... even though checkered with failure, than to ... live in the grey twilight that knows not victory or defeat.''

There was a time when most American daily newspapers were not afraid of anybody. They were read because they had plain, straight-forward and muscular reporting and editorial writing. They would say things few others in a community dared say. No paper is perfect, but The Chronicle editorial page, I predict, will carry on its great tradition and remain a great watchdog through institutional editorials under the supervision of a fine professional editor, Suzanne Downing. It is rightly committed to running as many letters from readers as possible - a great vehicle for healthy debate in a community.

A newspaper, though, must strive to fulfill its overall mission: Get the news first and get it right. It needs to remember a second simple creed: Emphasize the local; that's what it can do best. If it does these two things well, it can effectively compete with television and the Internet.

All too many sessions of the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the National Conference of Editorial Writers are highlighted by boring editors who ramble on about ``diversity'' or ``citizenship'' and then return home to help put out papers filled with mush that fewer and fewer people care to read.

Now some words about the Southeastern Legal Foundation.

I am particularly honored to accept its presidency as it begins to celebrate its 25th anniversary. My friend Dick Williams, a longtime Atlanta journalist/pundit, reminds me that now my words ``will have real consequences, beyond the emotions of those hit with flattery or scorn.'' Williams notes I will have a ``win-loss record to defend'' in this new arena.

I am impressed that the foundation's board, staff and lawyers took on daunting challenges ranging from protecting private property rights to challenging illegal racial quotas. Many legal experts said those cases couldn't be won, but they were. The foundation certainly does not live ``in the grey twilight that knows not victory or defeat.''

The Southeastern Legal Foundation, like the traditional newspapers that made (and continue to make) this republic great, is all about crusading. It has already proven itself as an important weapon against big government and half-baked social schemes that ruin the fabric of society.

But new battles lie ahead for everyone who wants to keep this nation free.

The campaign finance bill that recently passed the U.S. Senate, for example, is a dagger poised at the heart of the First Amendment. The Chronicle and many other newspapers at both ends of the ideological spectrum have been trying to sound a Paul Revere-style warning to Americans in this regard. But, so far, it hasn't been enough.

The Senate version must be altered or derailed by the House of Representatives. At the same time, our elected representatives need to be educated as to why this bill is such a threat.

SO I'M GLAD to see large segments of the media - even the liberal media I have often criticized on this page during the past 25 years - finally beginning to recognize the infringements on free speech the Senate bill contains. In this area, they are beginning to be the watchdogs they should have been all along. It's also encouraging for the future of this country - and for free speech - that there are others out there, especially the feisty foundation I'm about to join, not only watching but willing to fight back.

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