Daily newspapers are struggling. We're all worried about readership, advertising, making our web presence profitable, attracting younger readers - the list of concerns doesn't stop. So once in a while it helps to be reminded of the great work that one newspaper reporter can do.

I had that pleasure last weekend, when I traveled to Colby College in Waterville, Maine, for the Elijah Parish Lovejoy convocation. Lovejoy, a Colby alum, was a crusading antebellum editor. He supported the abolition of slavery, and his unwillingness to back down from this unpopular position cost him his life.

Several times thugs destroyed his printing presses. The last time, on Nov. 7. 1837, in Alton, Ill., they set fire to the building and killed Lovejoy. He was buried on his 35th birthday.

Each year since 1952, his alma mater has honored a journalist in Lovejoy's name. On Sunday, at the 54th convocation, that journalist was Jerry Mitchell of the Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Miss.

Mitchell is a 47-year-old investigative reporter who has spent much of the last 18 years pursuing justice in Mississippi. His work has resulted in the jailing of four Ku Klux Klansmen who were involved in some of the most horrific killings of the Civil Rights era. The four are the assassin of Medgar Evers; the man who ordered the firebombing that killed Vernon Dahmer, a leader of the NAACP; one of the church bombers who killed four girls in Birmingham, Ala.; and a man involved in the killings of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner on the day after they arrived in Mississippi.

Mitchell has forced Mississippians to confront their past. Sometimes, he said on Sunday, this has had positive results beyond bringing criminals to justice. Many people who would have preferred to keep the truth in the dark have come around to see the convictions as cleansing and healing.

Certainly the victims' loved ones have found them so.

Mitchell's work is great shoe-leather journalism. Some of the stories he told about it reminded me of the journalism adage, "If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out." The alibi of Bobby Cherry, one of the Birmingham church bombers, was that he was home watching wrestling at the time the bomb was planted.

With the help of the Clarion-Ledgerlibrarian, Mitchell figured out that there was no wrestling on television in Birmingham at the time.

Mitchell has faced threats and survived frightening moments. Sometimes he has interviewed his subjects, alone, over barbecue or in their homes. The wife of one of them sent him off with a sandwich for the road. He decided not to eat it. These were men who, though now old, had killed people they perceived as enemies of white supremacy.

Why did these murderers talk to him? "Here's the unique truth you find,"Mitchell once told USA Today. "People all want to tell their stories. And you appeal to that."

After Mitchell's speech at the Lovejoy convocation, an audience member asked him where he got the courage to pursue these stories.

Faith was part of his answer. He also acknowledged that he had had to come to grips with this question when he received a death threat very early in his career as a civil rights reporter. He said he decided that worse things could happen in the world than for him to die pursuing this mission.

I asked Mitchell's mother if she had observed anything during his childhood that led her to think he would be chasing down old civil rights killers as a reporter. She chuckled and said no, not really. Then she added that for her son -"Boo," she called him, using his nickname - the issue was not so much racial equality as it was injustice.

Boo, she said, could never stand to see people get away with things.

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