I went to the New Urbanism conference last weekend in Philly, which was rapprochement of sorts. For years I felt I had almost been actively urged not to come to these annual events, whereas this time I was invited as a speaker on one of the panels. I enjoyed being there. Despite all my criticisms of the movement, I felt mostly at home there, and ran into all sorts of people I knew.

I was on a panel with Inga Saffron of the Philadelphia Inquirer on managing the media. Inga, the architecture critic for the Inky, follows a long tradition within newspapers of writers migrating to specialties they at first seem to have no particular background for. Before architecture critic, Inga was a foreign correspondent and covered two quite dangerous wars in Chechnya and Bosnia. I suspect her experience in such areas grounds her in covering subjects like contemporary architecture that are high in passion but short in actual danger, except to people’s egos.

Inga is hardly alone in making such transitions. Frank Bruni, a classmate of mine at Columbia Journalism School, went from covering George Bush during his 2000 presidential race, to covering Italy as bureau chief, to the current Food Critic at The New York Times. Quite a journey. I envy his legs. Alessandra Stanley, the Times current television critic, used to be a Moscow bureau chief where she got to know Inga Saffron, I was told. Stephen Kinzer, author of Bitter Fruit and an acclaimed writer on Central America and the world, frequently writes about art for the Times. And so on.

In my own much smaller way, I’m an example of this phenomena. I went from wanting and sometimes being a foreign correspondent early in my career in places like Central America, to being mostly a local political and city hall reporter, to then writing a lot about development, before gradually focusing primarily on the squishier subjects of urban planning, design, architecture, culture, economics and everything else that goes into human development. It’s certainly a valid accusation that we generalists lack something in depth by having such an eclectic background, but we gain something as well. By getting a broader taste of the world, we may able to judge and weigh things with a greater dollop of truth per word. Let’s hope so.