I was a reporter for two years. I was an editor for 14 years. I was a general manager for 12 years. I’ve been a publisher for a week.

What’s the difference between the new gig and all the others? Everything, and nothing.

First, the everything part. In the past century there have been three publishers of the local newspaper company based in Bristol, R.I. I’m the fourth.

In nearly 100 years, only three people held this job. Roswell Bosworth, Sr. became publisher of the Bristol Phoenix in 1929. He later transferred the company to his son, Roswell Bosworth, Jr., who handed the responsibility to his stepson, Matthew D. Hayes, back in the 1990s.

Those three distinguished publishers steered the company through highs and lows, wars and hurricanes, growth and consolidation, the internet and a pandemic. They and a handful of publishers before them kept us publishing, continuously, for 188 years.

They also built a culture that is soaked into the frame of the historic building we occupy in downtown Bristol. We publish no matter what. We challenge readers and leaders. We reflect and celebrate the community. We welcome all voices. We speak for those who cannot or do not. I believe deeply in these standards, and I feel the weight of that responsibility.

In his outgoing remarks, departing U.S. President Joe Biden spoke three times of the “free press” and its role in America. We — 23 hard-working people putting together seven weekly newspapers and a 24/7/365 regional website — are a very small but proud member of that free press.

The other side of this publisher gig is that even though I’m the guy in charge, I still answer to the visitor at the front desk, which is exactly what happened in my first day on the job. Even though my workspace is near the front door — feel free to drop in, say hi and check out the newly renovated space at 1 Bradford St. — I happened to be back in the controller’s office talking about our 2025 operating budget when I was summoned to the front. A customer was demanding to speak to the person in charge.

Standing there was a delightful but stern, longtime subscriber to the Westport Shorelines. She wanted to know why we stopped publishing the tides chart a few weeks ago. It was one of the things she found most valuable in her local paper.

I mostly listened and smiled back at her. I thought about the many phone apps now available that track the tides to within a second and a few feet of your exact location, but I bit my tongue. The hypocrisy of telling people to buy newspapers while simultaneously removing their beloved content because the internet does it better was not lost on me.

At this point, she nearly had me convinced, but she wasn’t done, and for her final retort I had no words. She flipped through one of our papers, the Warren Times-Gazette, and arrived at a page with a gaping empty space roughly the size of a tide chart. “How about right here?” she asked. “You could have put it here.”

She was 100 percent right. We could have.

She paused, looked at the page more closely and then added, “Oh, look. Here YOU are!”

And there I was. The space-wasting story announcing the new publisher, complete with large headline and portrait photo of yours truly, was directly above the empty space where a tide chart could have run.

She had me. I told her we would bring back the tide charts, which we will do, starting next week.

So begins the tenure of a local newspaper publisher. The new job is everything I expected it would be.

Scott Pickering is publisher of East Bay Media Group. He can be reached at: spickering@eastbaymediagroup.com.