This is me in the crowd at Pike Place Market in 2008, on the day that Starbucks introduced its Pike Place Roast. CEO Howard Schultz is signing autographs in the foreground.

While on a recent business trip, I made some coffee in my hotel using the coffee maker next to the television.

The Starbucks packets seemed designed especially for the hotel brewer. On check out, I braced myself, expecting to be charged something outrageous.

I got my bill and scanned it. “There’s no charge for the coffee on here,” I told the hotel clerk.

“Oh, no charge for that,” he said.

“Wait, so, the coffee is free?” I asked. “But you charge for drinking the bottled water in the fridge?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

My goodness, I thought, in our society, coffee is considered more necessary than water.

The first time that I met Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, I didn’t know the difference between an espresso and a brew.

And I didn’t even know enough about coffee to know that it was something I should have known.

Maybe it was fitting that as a business reporter, I wasn’t already a fan of the company or its main product. That was more than two years ago. That was before I traded in my daily Diet Cokes for daily coffees.

It occurred to me early on in my career that caffeine was more necessity than luxury if I wanted to make something of myself in modern society. In fact, coffee and tea surged in popularity at the advance of the industrial revolution. (One of the best articles I’ve read on humanity’s dependence upon caffeine is by National Geographic. Check it out here.)

By the time I was a full-time college student, spending long nights writing up physics experiment reports and spending my days working for FDIC in Arlington, Va., I was consuming 32 ounces of regular Coca-Cola per day.

One day, my boss’s boss saw me at my desk with one: My mouth connected to a giant red and white cup via straw. “Do you know how much sugar is in that?” he said. “You’re going to get so fat if you keep drinking that. Switch to diet.”

And, so, I switched to diet. It was difficult at first, because I didn’t like the taste. But then, addiction set in. Diet Coke became “liquid goodness.”

Here I am in Amsterdam in 2007, drinking a "Coca-Cola Light," which is the non-US version of Diet Coke.

I developed a Pavlovian response to the sight of that cold silver can, the feel of its weight in my hands, the cracking sound of the tab — oh, addicts, do you feel me? I would tuck a Diet Coke can behind my feet under my church pew. You’d never find me without a can in my hand. I bonded with news sources over this shared addiction.

Coffee, meanwhile, seemed gross. Who knows what they put in that?

Starbucks taught me exactly what.

Because Starbucks is a brand that must maintain a positive public image, it employs a powerful team of public relations staff. The team struck me as particularly competent at what it did — the staff works hard to educate reporters about the company, and more importantly, about coffee.

I grew up in in a working class New Jersey household. Morning joe meant pouring boiling water over a scoop of Maxwell House instant. My parents kept Sweet’N Low packets in a dish on the table, next to the salt and pepper shakers. And my mother kept a white cannister of saccharin tablets next to her purse, for her morning tea. (As a child, I thought that men drank coffee and women drank tea.)

On a day-long immersion tour of Starbucks, I learned the difference between low-quality robusta and high-quality arabica beans, I saw the labs where the company’s scientists determined which temperatures brought out the best flavors, and I learned about distribution and marketing and product sourcing. (Did you know that the Japanese are the largest consumers of instant coffee? They sell it in machines over there like they do soda here.)

Before that day, I’d thought that coffee beans came brown. I learned that they are plucked off of the trees green and then roasted brown.

For some reason, I’d always thought that coffee was engineered from man-made chemicals. I realized that coffee is as natural as salad. It’s water run through roasted beans. It fit into my decision to make simpler and healthy lifestyle choices.

In October 2009, I officially made the switch to coffee as my main source of caffeine.

I use a French press in the morning. How about you?

If I were responsible for keeping the books, I would’ve shut it down too. It has taken me a year to realize that and admit it.

With its spinning neon globe overlooking Elliott Bay, the printed Seattle Post-Intelligencer was a West Coast institution. It was the state’s oldest business. A home for elegant scribes and scrappy diggers. Quirky. Artistic. Majestic. Beloved. Hated. Respected. Feared.

Working there as a reporter was a personal dream-come-true. I loved that place and proudly showed off my business card to whoever asked, “What do you do?”

After years of moving around the country and seeking a home, I’d found one in the P-I. I belonged at a newspaper. That newspaper. In a major city. In Seattle.

So when the Seattle P-I stopped printing one year ago, I felt shattered. “How could they do this to this city? To us?” I wondered about Hearst Corp., the New York-based company that owned the P-I.

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Last month, a professional in the information business asked me, “What’s Twitter?”

This question came from a smart and capable guy, and so I was stunned. The best definition I could come up with at first was something stupid like, “Twitter? Uh, it’s . . . Twitter, you know, where you tweet?”

Business people: You are allowed to not like Twitter. You are allowed to not get Twitter. But c’mon, you’ve got to know which technologies are changing how people communicate. Or else, you’re going to get blindsided.

Journalists seem to be having a love affair with Twitter. (Guilty.) But can you blame them for trying? They know what it’s like to be blindsided.

The newspaper implosion shocked a lot of us in print media. McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt said 2008 was the “worst year” of his life. “By far.” He may have been talking about money, but down in the ranks, we were shocked by our loss of authority. We shouldn’t have been. The clues were there all along.

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What an intriguing voicemail, I thought.

I looked down at the scribbles on my reporter notepad. “Hey Scott,” I said to my editor, “I just got the strangest message. There’s this investment bank that is looking to hire someone to do corporate research, and they got my name.”

Scott didn’t miss a beat: “Call him back.”

I Googled the firm and the stock analyst who’d left the voicemail. He’d been recently quoted in Forbes. I called him back.

That was about one month ago. Fast forward to now. August 12 will be my last day reporting and writing for seattlepi.com. In a few weeks, I will start as a research associate at the investment bank.

If you’d told me last year – nay, last quarter – that I’d quit my journalism job to go work for an investment bank, I would have said, “Get out.” (At least, that was the reaction of my former business editor Margaret when she heard the news, followed by, “Congratulations!”)

But then again, a lot has happened in the past year that I wouldn’t have thought possible. First, I attended the inauguration of the first black president and sat near the front row. Then, Lady Fortune came out of nowhere,  took a big swig of liquid economy, picked up the baseball bat marked “career,” and whacked most of my friends. My newspaper shut down. WaMu disappeared. Back to the point. . .

I’m excited about this transition into a world to which I’m already connected. Often when a business stumps me with some change of direction or unique accounting charge, I turn to analyst experts for help. After about six years of covering the markets and business, now I get to learn what makes Wall Street analysts tick. I never could resist the allure of learning new things!

And so, off I go.

Journalism asks: How can you leave me?

Please do not interpret my leaving seattlepi.com as foreboding about the news site’s future. The Web site commands a high readership and from what I hear from management, the already robust content will get fuller and better with each new partnership and added revenue stream.

Journalism industry watchers would do well to keep an eye on Seattle’s online journalism experiments, from what Hearst is doing at seattlepi.com to the rise of community news blogs that are rich with engagement.

Journalism is a rapidly changing industry, and for the past few years, I’ve had a front row seat.

The future will include more democratization of data, more citizen engagement, more unpaid writers, fewer generalists, more amateurs with fan followings, a greater appreciation for quality business reporting, and a whittling down of traditional journalistic authority against the rise of the niche-hobbyist-turned-pro.

The notion of journalists as gatekeepers is obsolete — those who pridefully struggle to hold onto that antiquated view will watch helplessly as information flows around, over and beneath the gates. Those who humbly embrace these changes will become the new stars, appreciated for their ability to generate unique content while at the same time navigating and making sense of the information flow.

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Witnessing and writing about the death of one’s own newspaper is not something I’d wish on any reporter.

Dan Richman and I kept it together enough to write the front page headline story for the last edition of the newspaper:

The online version has a different lede than the version that ran in print, which read:

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has printed its last edition. You’re reading it.

The newspaper sold out all over the city. It comes wrapped in a commemorative edition with essays and stories by our best writers.

Hearst gave me the option of sticking around as a business reporter with seattlepi.com, and I accepted the offer.

Here’s the squiggly pink worm that I bit like a hungry fish: The Seattle Post-Intelligencer would be the first printed newspaper in the country to transition to an all-online model. If it works, I’d have witnessed something remarkable, the future of general news daily journalism.

Curiosity overwhelms me. What is it like to witness the death of a newspaper, and a rebirth? Do I want to see this first hand, in all its pain and glory? Yes, I do.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has been put up for sale, and if no buyer emerges, the paper will shut down.

Business reporter Dan Richman and I shared responsibility for reporting on this most unhappy news.

I wrote this part, which was quoted on Poynter’s Romenesko blog:

“P-I employees were silent. Some of them shed tears.”

Others held up cell phones or voice recorders in press-conference fashion as they heard that their paper was up for sale. “This is awful, awful, awful,” editorial cartoonist David Horsey said after the newsroom meeting. “I was just standing there looking around at all these people I love to work with. I don’t want this to happen to me or them.”

This is a sad day. But whenever I start to mourn, I just get back to writing and making calls. Reporting has helped me get through a lot in my life, and it’s helping me now.

Friends,

Seattle will remain a two newspaper town. And I am working for a very, very happy newsroom.

I was at a journalist training workshop at the Tacoma News Tribune when an editor walked in with a breaking news  update: “The Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer have reached a settlement that will allow both newspapers to continue publishing for the foreseeable future.”

The delightful shock rocked my core. The enormity of what that meant exactly — for my job, for my co-workers, for my future — started to flood through my brain.

“I get to keep my job. I get to stay in Seattle! Oh thank God. Thank God.”

About 75 reporters filled the room from various regional papers. Including, to my surprise, Shawna Gamache, a reporter whom I attended grad school with.

But only three reporters were from the Seattle Times — they were gloomier — and I was the only one from the P-I. My colleague, Daniel, arrived later. He told everyone, “I knew Andrea was in the room because she tackled me from behind with a hug.”

The reporters around me said, “Congratulations.”  My phone was filled with text messages, including from my mentor, Rob Wells, who was ecstatic.

Taking this job, moving across the country, was a risk. But one that I gladly took given that I get to work for a stellar newspaper and live in Seattle — a gorgeous, clean and livable city.

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Friends,

I’ll just put the lead at the front, so if you read no further, you’ll know this much:

At the end of the month, I will move to Seattle, Washington.

Today is my 25th birthday, and it is bittersweet. I’m a bit overwhelmed, but in a very good way after a whirlwind week in the Pacific Northwest.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the oldest daily newspaper in that city, flew me to town to interview for a business reporting position.

I left Mobile last Saturday with a packed suitcase and a head full of story ideas for those editors. I returned today with a job offer, a signed lease on a Seattle apartment and no liquids in my carry-on.

Before the interview, the paper put me up in a $300 per night Marriott hotel on Lake Union, gave me a rental car and said, “explore.”

I did.

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