The meeting of the Left Coast chapter of the ConcordMonitor alumni association convened two Sundays ago at a cozy French restaurant in Berkeley. We achieved a quorum and got down to the business of discovering that people don't change. The Monitor has a record of hiring talented, ambitious journalists who are also nice, and those qualities still define them after they move on.

There is no official alumni association, of course, but the dinner reminded me once again what great journalists have passed through Concord over the years. Some don't just pass through - they stay, or leave and come back (recidivists, I call them), to become the heart of the staff. But most move on.

You may remember their names from their Monitor bylines or photo credits or from dealing with them on local stories. Despite the certainty that I will leave out some old friends, my aim this morning is to tell you what has become of some of them - so far.

I say so far because their careers are works in progress. The four California journalists who made it to our Berkeley reunion included Ann E. Marimow, a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News. During her Monitor days, by the luck of the draw, Ann covered the 2000 John McCain campaign. In California, she has another plum assignment: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. But she told me over dinner she wanted to come back east, mainly for personal reasons, and this past week the WashingtonPost hiredher.

Others around the table were John Fensterwald, one of my best friends and now an editorial writer at the San Jose paper; Jordan Rau, who covers the California Senate for the Los Angeles Times, and Carrie Sturrock, a reporter with the San Francisco Chronicle.

Among those missing from the table from California papers were Aaron Zitner and Ben Stocking. Both had excused absences.

Aaron worked for the BostonGlobe for several years before moving on to the Los Angeles Times. After years of reporting, most recently on stem-cell research, he's an editor in the paper's Washington bureau. Ben, a reporter for the MercuryNews, is off covering Southeast Asia.

Ben is not the only former Monitor staffer working as a foreign correspondent. By coincidence, Scott Calvert and Craig Timberg, who shared a Concord apartment while working at the Monitor in the 1990s, are together again in Johannesburg, South Africa. Scott, who also served as an embedded reporter with the 101st Airborne Division during the Iraq war, works for the BaltimoreSun, Craig for the Washington Post.

Last fall, Scott married another former Monitor reporter, Stephanie Hanes, who also worked for the Sun until Scott took the Johannesburg assignment. Stephanie is freelancing from Africa, and we hope to run some of her work on this page before long.

Other Monitor alums work for the Sun. Longtime Monitor front-page columnist Tom Keyser is an ace turf writer there. Alec MacGillis is a reporter on the paper's investigative team. He was the lead writer on some of the Sun's coverage of the D.C. sniper case two years ago. Candy Thomson, once a local editor here, is an outdoor writer for the Sun.

Sarah Koenig covered George W. Bush for us during the 2000 primary campaign and also did a quirky radio profile of the future president for ThisAmericanLife, the public radio show. She left us for the Sunbut now works as a producer for ThisAmericanLife.

Our colony at the WashingtonPost includes photographer Andrea Bruce Woodall, whose pictures and diary from Iraq recently graced this page; editor Tom Shantz, who designed our front page 25 years ago; Jo Becker, an aggressive reporter both here and there, and Ceci Connolly, who covered the 1988 Pat Robertson campaign for the Monitor and the 2000 Al Gore campaign for the Post.

Our large alumni contingent at the BostonGlobe is about to go up by one. The paper has just hired our Lisa Wangsness to cover city hall. She'll join a crew that includes Chris Morris, our page one editor who is now an editor there; business writer Charlie Stein; Chad Finn, Fluto Shinzawa and Jim McBride in sports; photographers Michele McDonald and Suzanne Kreiter; reporters Kathy Burge, Sarah Schweitzer and Jamie Vaznis; and Bob Hohler, the paper's Red Sox beat writer for more than four years.

Bob gave up the assignment after writing the Red Sox to a championship. This winter, he graciously stopped by the Monitor to share tales from field and clubhouse with our staff. Longtime Monitor readers may remember Bob as Christa McAuliffe's shadow, from her months as a finalist in the Teacher in Space program until her tragic death. He also wrote McAuliffe's biography, "I Touch the Future . . ."

Former Monitor journalists toil in smaller numbers at larger papers all across the country. Lee Horwich set up in the Monitornewsroom early last year to coordinate coverage of the presidential primary for USA Today, where he works as an editor. Sarah C. Vos is in Lexington, Ky. Kent Fischer and Todd Archer work at the Dallas Morning News (Archer covers the Dallas Cowboys).

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