A cynical observer might have said we were being defensive, clamoring on about why we stay at smaller newspapers in Iowa when our careers could have taken us elsewhere, and dismissed us as a bunch of underachievers. Or, worse, losers making excuses for ourselves.

The observer would have been wrong. (And, no, former Des Moines Register columnist Chuck Offenburger, who will be “Iowa Boy” until he’s well into his 90s, was nowhere around in his role as the state’s head cheerleader.)

The conversation took place at the annual Iowa Newspaper Association convention, where newspaper professionals from across the state get together every year to exchange ideas, congratulate each other over awards for writing and advertising, and talk shop.

Invariably, the conversation turns to Iowa and why we stayed when our peers were fleeing. My pal Amy Duncan, for example, could find a job anywhere. A youngster compared with many of the publishers at the convention, Amy is publisher of two weekly newspapers, the Record-Herald and Indianola Tribune and the Altoona Herald-Mitchellville Index. Her star started rising before she left high school and it hasn’t shown any signs of descent. Yet she chooses to remain in Iowa, where she and her husband, Mark Davitt, another newspaper professional before he became a state representative, are raising two young children. But even if they didn’t see Iowa as a great place for kids to grow up, I think they’d stay based on the state’s other merits.

A half-dozen other newspaper veterans would nod in agreement.

From the perspectives of most of us, there’s more going for Iowa than against it. Sure we’ve got problems. What state doesn’t? But smog-filled air, high crime rates, exorbitant living costs that take the buoyancy out of higher salaries, rush-hour (as opposed to rush-minute) traffic bottlenecks and endemic multigenerational poverty, like that found in the Appalachian region, aren’t among them.

No fickle friend to the state, we’re in it for the long haul. We like the fact that we write for an educated and literate citizenry, where we can resist the tendency to dumb it down and write to the lowest common denominator. We like the civility of the place, the fact that the in-depth article exploring solutions to some of the serious issues facing the state are the rule, while the investigative piece on graft and corruption is the rare exception. Many of us went to journalism school with the expectation we’d be vying for Bob Woodward or Carl Bernstein’s job one day, but learned along the way that we prefer the intimate relationship we’ve developed with readers over the years that allows us to talk about the important issues facing Iowa in the future.

On the editorial pages of Iowa’s newspapers, collectively among the best in the country, those issues are hashed out week after week in editorials, columns and letters to the editor. Anyone wondering what’s important to Iowans need look no further than those pages to find the answer. We have a stake in what happens to Iowa and it’s a privilege to be in a position to facilitate that public discourse.

That’s why we stay.

It’s too bad the Iowa Legislature wasn’t listening in on the conversation. But perhaps lawmakers are reading the 320 INA-member newspapers to find out what their constituents really think.

Beth Dalbey is editorial director of Business Publications Corp. E-mail her at bethdalbey@bpcdm.com.