For the first time in nearly 40 years, I am out of daily journalism. Whether this turns out to be a temporary or a permanent situation remains to be seen. I can tell you, though, having done a kind of work that is rather specialized, as work goes, week in and week out for nearly two-thirds of my life, my new status feels quite odd to me.

I noticed it particularly while driving with our two younger boys from St. Louis to Palo Alto, Calif. When it came time to check into a motel at night, I was confronted by that line on the registration card that reads "Representing."

For the first time since I was in my 20s, I was representing no one. And I must confess that I could not bear to put down that I was unemployed. So, even though my new duties at Stanford do not begin until September, I wrote the name of the university into the box on the registration form.

More productively, I hope, I have been reflecting on this business of ours and our place in it - as professionals, of course, but also as human beings. And it is these thoughts that I would like to share with you today.

Some of you may have noticed that there was an interview with me published in the July issue of the American Journalism Review. To have journalism done to you, as we do unto others every day, is often an unnerving experience, but this was a nice piece. It was the title, though, "After The Fall," that set my introspection into motion.

I suspect the editors of the review wanted to convey a sense of their subject's thoughts and emotions as he was stepping down from a long tenure of authority and prestige. That was fair enough.

But there is another way to read that title. To persons of the Christian faith, the phrase "After the Fall" has a particular meaning. Now be assured that this is going to be a determinedly secular talk. But since I was a small boy in Shanghai, where the men of our family were expected to attend St. John's University, and the women went to a missionary school called McTyeire's, I have been familiar with Christian precepts. What those words "After the Fall" mean is the fail into error and sin from a state of grace.

Now it is true that I was not expelled from daily journalism. I retired after 34 years at the Post-Dispatch, leaving of my own free will when otherwise I might have stayed in a company that itself was undergoing a fundamental change, from the values and philosophy that drove the late Joseph Pulitzer Jr., who was my chairman, to something quite different. Whether I stayed or not, they were looking for something they called the leadership of the 21st century, which suggests that the qualities that make up leadership change with the years, like fashions.

I happen to be believe they do not. Management theories and techniques may come and go, but leadership, that intangible set of skills and character, does not. I think decency and courage and judgment and the ability to make men and women believe in themselves and their enterprise so deeply that they will walk through fire to reach their objective are immutable. I would not lay claim to have been an exemplar in any of these, but I did my best, and in the end, I think the owners, with their eyes on the leadership of another century, were not sorry to see me go.

Even so, the title of the journalism piece preyed on my mind. Even so, I found myself wondering if the words "After the Fall," meant, in the end, that I had failed. Was there something inherent in me, like an original sin, as journalism measures sin and error, that made this outcome inevitable?

Members of this organization have hinted to me that if only I had been a little less Asian, had only been a bit more assertive, all of this might not have come to pass. They have asked whether my being Chinese had anything to do with the ownership's decision to seek its salvation in a man or woman for the seasons of another century. In asking, they were not suggesting anything so crude as racial discrimination.

No, they were referring, indirectly, to that haunting question of whether Asians can ascend to and survive at the summit of a business that has few Asians above the timberline. And so, I asked myself whether things would have been different if I only I had been different; and, of course, there is no answer to that question.

To determine whether one has failed, we need first to understand the measurements by which success is defined. Is a place at the top and failure a place in the middle or down at the bottom? Is success measured by who you are, by the title after your name or by the reporting chain of other workers that leads to you? Are the lines and the words on the organization chart all that we need to understand success and failure? Or is there something deeper, something more fundamental, that these lines and words may reflect but very possibly may not?

For the truth of the matter, we need to look at and be utterly clear about the purpose of our work, about the end toward which all of our labors are directed. We are journalists, but is that our supreme purpose, to be journalists? If it is, success or failure can indeed be measured by bylines and organization charts. If it is, too, then it necessarily must follow that the ultimate purpose of journalism is the practice of journalism - that journalism not only is an end unto itself but that it is also the end unto itself.

If you take this position, you also are compelled to accept the proposition that journalism, being a self-contained practice and purpose, can only yield to the evaluation and judgment of journalists. You are compelled to declare that society has no business judging or criticizing the press, since society is irrelevant to the purpose or mission of the press. If you have not heard this argument, couched in the self-righteous allusions to the First Amendment and its protections (rarely however its obligations) I suspect you haven't been listening.

I happen to reject this view completely, although when I was much younger I probably subscribed to it. The notion has a romantic appeal to it, but it wholly fallacious. Who would consent to the view that only doctors are entitled to pass judgment on the work of other doctors - that the end of the surgeon's effort is to do surgery, not to heal or save lives? Who would agree that what lawyers do is fit only for the review of other lawyers - that the values of society are irrelevant to the practice of law?

I said, I reject this point of view as it pertains to journalism, and I hope you do as well. I believe that journalism is not an end unto itself but only a means by which we attempt to arrive at that greater end, or purpose. I believe that the end of journalism is not the organization chart but what happens after the journalism is done.

I believe the end of journalism is to serve people in the most profound way possible, which is to give them reliable information and facts and opinion, arrived at by hard, backbreaking intellectual labor and formed by judgment and guided always by, integrity, so that men and women may be assisted in making the decisions that determine the outcome of their personal and civic and commercial and political lives. I believe the purpose of journalism is not journalism but helping people live lives of liberty, as free men and free women in the most radical sense of the word.

Now we do not have separate lives from these members of society whom we serve; we are among them, we are part of them as surely as are the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker and everyone else. What I am saying is that we are human beings first and journalists second.

What I am saying is that each of us will come to that time when someone can say of us that it is "After the Fall," or that we can say of ourselves that it is time to call it quits and go on to something else. That day comes for every editor, every reporter, every photographer or news artist. We are journalists for only a time, but we are human beings always, forever and ever.

And so when that moment arrives the question only incidentally is what kind of journalist have we been, where our place has been recorded, and since erased, on the organization chart. The question is what kind of man, what kind of woman, have we been. And here we measure ourselves in terms of success and failure exactly as everyone else is measured: by the qualities of decency, honesty, courage, compassion and humility - by how hard, how faithfully, we have given ourselves to these values.

Of this you may be asking, does it not matter whether we are professionally competent or skilled, whether we are recognized as among the best at our business? And I am saying that yes, it does matter. Like all other people, we Asian Americans are not exempted from the laws of human nature and the pleasures that come with reward for good work.

Moreover, the very things that make one a superior human being are necessary to being a superior journalist. It is not the other way around. The moral cowards and the intellectually slothful do not succeed in our business.

I am privileged to belong to the American Society of Newspaper Editors and privileged, more, to serve on its board of directors. The men and women with whom I serve are among the finest people I have ever been associated with. There are no moral cowards or intellectual sloths there.

They are where they are by reason of character. And so the better you are, the more authority or power you command, the better you can serve that great public purpose that is the mission of journalism.

So these things do matter, but at the end of the day, they do not matter absolutely. At the end of the day, what you do in the privacy of your family, in the interactions of your heart with the hearts of other people, is more important, still. What you do in the privacy of your family and in the intersections of the heart will tell more than anything else the story of your success or your failure.

Be good journalists. I hope every one of you is recognized as such and is rewarded handsomely. But first, be good at that thing that is central to our lives, each and every one of us, as human beings.

Woo is the Lorry I. Lokey Visiting Professor of Journalism at Stanford University.