ON TUESDAY NOVEMBER 30th, dozens of people gathered for a funeral in Wakefield, Massachusetts. If you didn’t recognize the people who presented the readings and the eulogy when they first stepped to the front of the church, you might have when they started speaking: They were all voices from Boston-area news radio stations.

We were there to say goodbye to Kevin McNicholas, a 61-year-old radio correspondent who died on Thanksgiving Day. Kevin spent his life working as a stringer in the Massachusetts State House. Every day for decades, he would collect sound at press conferences, Chamber of Commerce breakfasts and Legislative sessions and send them over to the Greater Boston Area’s news radio stations.

I met Kevin in the summer of 2009, when I was a radio intern at WBUR-FM. A month into my internship,  I was tasked by the newsroom’s managing editor with babysitting the verdict at the kidnapping trial of the Man Known As Clark Rockefeller. This zany dude had spent years pretending he was a millionaire, but had skipped town with his daughter after his wife left him.

My assigned mission was to go to the Suffolk County Courthouse, record the closing arguments of the trial and then wait for the verdict. Maybe it sounds easy, but I had no idea what I was doing. I’d never so much as stepped into a courtroom before, and hadn’t a clue how deliberations would unfold or what courtroom etiquette involved. I had no experience navigating press scrums. But someone at WBUR told me to find a grizzly-voiced man named Kevin and I’d be fine.

So I did, and I immediately had a friend.

Jury deliberations are very, very, very uneventful if you are not part of the jury. This jury deliberated for a week, giving Kevin and I a good deal of quality time. He showed me where to sit, when to record, whom to avoid, when to pepper the lawyers with questions, and where I could find the best napping spots. He delivered his lessons in that blunt yet non-patronizing way of his, where you didn’t realize you were actually in the middle of a pretty intense learning experience until afterward. At lunchtime, I’d share the fruit in my lunchbox with him (well, actually I offered him some and he would proceed to eat most of it) and he’d tell stories of his years covering trials and politics, or introduce me to the folks around. I was a new and clearly naive face surrounded by the weather-beaten guard of Boston reporters who covered that trial, and Kevin’s immediate acceptance and friendliness helped me stay afloat in a group I was learning I wanted to join.

KEVIN SPENT HIS whole life doing one of radio’s more thankless jobs. He went to hearings and trials and press conferences, listened through some of the dullest speakers around, and sent cuts of sound out to stations, rarely voicing stories himself.

Kevin didn’t have a car or a cell phone. He didn’t use email and he certainly didn’t know how to use new media fodder like Twitter and Facebook. But the man knew everything about Massachusetts politics. Everything. By the time he died, he was called the Dean of the State House press corps. He was constantly making connections that many of us couldn’t grasp without his encyclopedic memory. Kevin’s expertise in itself made Boston’s news coverage better.

And Kevin never kept any of that to himself. It made him long-winded at times — but it also made him a very, very good teacher. That’s why we were all asked to pray for mentorship at his funeral. “May the experts in this field continue to teach and guide those who want to learn,” said the priest. I could feel the room sigh. Kevin’s only family was his sister, but the room was full of people ages 22 to 70 or so, and I think he acted as a mentor and teacher to most of us there. He had something to teach to producers and reporters thirty years my senior–and helped those of us newer to the business find our feet.

WITH EACH NEW hire at the Daily Planet or the National Journal, each live tweet from a courtroom or crowd-sourced piece of information, journalism is changing – and it’s happening awfully fast. Old journalistic models fail to hold up to the demands of today’s market and it seems like the only way survive is to experiment ourselves as far away from them–and as far into the future–as we can. Young journalists compete for fewer jobs than ever, and to get ahead things sometimes simply get snarky.

That means many of us young’ns are tempted to look anywhere but old media for lessons in how to get ourselves jobs and–-if we care enough–-keep this industry alive. But there is still so much to we can learn from people like Kevin, a man who might just epitomize old media. He did the same job for decades, but made it his business to become a total expert at it. He didn’t try to make his stories about himself — but he was a stalwart in his reliability. He always had a strong, insightful question for the politicians, lawyers and businesspeople he dealt with.

The worth of these lessons to journalists (and other folks too!) will endure no matter what medium we work in. Me and the dozens, maybe hundreds, of people who learned them from Kevin were lucky. We got the chance to listen to a man who spent his life listening to others.