With the exception of EMTs, doctors in ER, and morticians, no industry, not even the military, encounters death as regularly as we in the news media do. So perhaps we can be forgiven for the disproportionate attention and sentiment we lavish on members of our guild when they die, as when Tim Russert was accorded the status of a head of state. That said, the capacity crowd of former mayors and reporters and the thinning ranks of reporters still practicing the trade who attended yesterday’s memorial service at BU’s Marsh Chapel for Alan Lupo was as much a requiem for the business he belonged to as it was a fitting tribute to a veteran who fought the good war.

He worked for The Globe, The Herald, The Phoenix as well as WBUR and WGBH.  He did reporting the way it used to be done, when reporters knew the City’s neighborhoods, lived in them, and often came from them, and could accurately be called “street reporters”.

Marty Nolan, a forty year veteran of the Globe and former editor of the editorial page told the Globe “Alan Lupo brought the city streets into the newsroom.”

Seeing how far newspapers have faded, it’s still hard to believe that in the Sixties the City had six daily newspapers, three editions in the morning and three in the afternoon. Reporters walked the streets, ran up the stairs of three deckers to knock on doors, drank (a lot) in local bars (and at work), and logged a lot of time in coffee shops, while back at the city desk of their newspaper, “re-write” men (they were all men) took the story details over the phone and wrote the stories so the street reporters could stay out on the street where they belonged.

I saw my friend Chris Lydon, with whom I worked on the Ten O’Clock News, quoted in the Globe last week as describing Lupo and the reporters of the generation as “interested in every inch of city turf, in the scoundrels and the saints, in the ancient history and all the present-day choices before the town.”

“You went to journalism school? Don’t tell anybody,” Lupo told the young Charlie Pierce at the Phoenix.

Lupo’s era didn’t need master’s degrees. Curiosity, hanging on street corners, a roll of dimes, a sense for the City and the love of listening and talking to people who often don’t get heard were the prerequisites for being a professional.

In the true style of localism, Lupo and his fellow street reporters knew the best thing you can do as a reporter is get out of the office. Life and a world of stories and insights are out there in the streets, in the people, the scoundrels and the saints, the history of the place that you can touch and feel, and try to convey. It’s a noble ambition in times as bad, as cheap, and as narrow as these, and one that Alan Lupo embraced.

He may never get a bridge or a street named for him. But over in Brookline, a deli (Zaftig’s) named a brisket sandwich after him (two latkes, horseradish, brisket and gravy). That and the columns of print from a fading world of newspapers will do. In the best sense of the term once used by real people on some of the city’s streets, the guy was connected.