WHEN I TOLD Robert Novak I was leaving him for New Hampshire, after working as his Washington, D.C., political reporter for five years, he disapproved mightily. Not because he had anything against New Hampshire.

It was October 1999, and I had been offered the editorial page editor job of the New Hampshire Union Leader and New Hampshire Sunday News -- just five months before the George W. Bush-John McCain and Al Gore-Bill Bradley primaries. "No one notices editorial writers," he warned me.

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Novak held editorial writing in low esteem because he held reporting in such high esteem. The two, of course, are supposed to be opposites. (Try telling that to the New York Times.)

Many people think of Bob Novak, who passed away on Tuesday at the age of 78, as a television commentator or opinion writer. But he considered himself a shoe-leather reporter on the editorial pages, where he could break news but legitimately mix it with his personal opinion. Breaking news was the highest form of journalism to him, and he wanted me to do it, too.

Bless his soul, I have no idea how he achieved his goal three times a week (which is how often his column ran during the years I worked for him). He would uncover stories the finest reporters in Washington had overlooked, and put a spin on them that would shake the country.

Even in my 20s, I didn't have the stamina to follow Bob Novak around. He read every national newspaper by 8 a.m. -- in the days before the Internet! He would have breakfast at the Army-Navy Club in downtown Washington with a source. By 9:30 a.m., he would be at his Pennsylvania Avenue office, making phone calls to nail down his story. For lunch, another source, another meal at the Army-Navy Club . . . or maybe on Capitol Hill.

His staff would hear typing all afternoon from behind his closed door -- and then, without warning -- the sound of the printer! The column was finished! He would race out the door by 6 p.m., jump in his black convertible Corvette, and -- during the years I worked for him -- speed off to CNN to appear on Inside Politics, or Crossfire, or Evans & Novak or The Capital Gang. He'd perhaps pick up a new story idea in the makeup room from one of his high-powered television guests. And the cycle would begin again.

He once told me that he and his late partner, Rowland Evans Jr., endeavored to give their readers five new bits of information in every column. As someone who has tried column writing on this very page, I can tell you it's difficult to give readers even one fact they haven't already learned in the paper's news section.

Eventually Novak came around and stopped being angry at me for moving to New Hampshire. Maybe it was when I began running his column on this paper's editorial page. "This is a real red-letter day for me," I remember him crooning when his column first appeared.

He had pined for his column to run in New Hampshire for decades, because, he told me, "They're such political junkies up there!" That was the highest compliment he could pay someone. There was no bigger political junkie than Novak himself.

I remember with awe the 30-minute lesson he gave me on Styles Bridges in the car as I drove around -- totally, completely lost -- looking for the Bridges House (the formal governor's home) on one of his campaign reporting trips in 2000. I had only lived in the state a few months, so even though I was the editorial page editor of the statewide newspaper, 1) I still felt like I worked for him, and 2) I was useless behind the wheel.

Beneath the surface, Novak was a sweetie, and he tried to take the pressure off me: "New Hampshire is the only state I've been to where someone has intentionally given me wrong directions," he groused.

So maybe the so-called Prince of Darkness did have something against New Hampshire after all.

But if he can watch politics from heaven, I know he's watching New Hampshire.

Bernadette Malone edited these pages from 1999 to 2001 and wrote a weekly column for them until 2004. She is currently a writer and editor in New York City.