If you want to know the legacy of Mary Dolbier Burkhardt, a 52-year-old Providence Journal editor who died suddenly last Friday, listen to the reporters who worked with her.

Kate Bramson says of the woman called Mimi: "She wanted every single thing this paper did to be the best it could be, and she always believed that every day we could turn out great work, and she inspired everybody to live up to that."

Good editors are like football coaches, disciplinarians, therapists or personal trainers. They tone reporters, hone their work and make them reach. They get no bylines and rarely win acclaim. It's enough for them to help shape stories that inform you, anger you, make you weep or make you smile. Burkhardt had a sense of outrage, a marvelous laugh and a patience for almost anything except phonies and abusers of trust.

Her husband, Andy, and her late father, Maurice Dolbier, used to work here, and she relished what newspapers could do. To her, journalism was an exciting, important and exacting profession. She conveyed that to her charges, especially younger ones, the group she focused most on in recent years.

She'd spend hours at a time with them. I'd tell them, "You know, you have a right to have an attorney." But they loved the attention and the care. Intern Katie Warchut, 23, says, "She really prodded us to ask the next question. She'd say, 'You left me hanging there; keep going and push them harder.' "

Reporter Tom Mooney is 44 now but was still in his 20s when he came under Burkhardt's tutelage. He says, "She had a love of language and she was always a tenacious editor. She would never allow you to give up on your story." It could be, he says, a "brutal experience" because, to her, words mattered so much. You may think editors rush reporters to finish. But sometimes it would be Mooney urging Burkhardt to let go. "She wouldn't surrender that story until it was the best it possibly could be."

Scott Mayerowitz, now 26 and in the State House Bureau, recalls being a Journal intern and commuting every day to Boston to cover a Rhode Island-related drug trial. Riding back on the train, he'd call Burkhardt and fill her in on the day's proceedings. She'd help him see how to structure the story. He'd start writing on his laptop and then come in and work with her to polish it and make it worthy of page 1. He says, "She knew when to give me my space and when to make suggestions and when to say, 'No, this needs to be fixed.' "

Jennifer Jordan, 36, marvels at Burkhardt's depth of caring. Burkhardt helped oversee profiles of victims of The Station fire. Jordan turned in a profile of a man to go in the next day's paper but had been unable to reach his daughter, so she had to make do as best she could. Now it was 9:30 p.m. Jordan was driving home when her cell phone rang. It was the daughter, filled with emotional recollections of her father. Jordan raced back to the paper and began to tear up as she told Burkhardt about the reminiscences. "Mimi started crying with me," she says. The two worked against deadline to include the daughter's memories.

I wasn't surprised to hear it. Kate Bramson said of Burkhardt, "She approached reporters and sources as human beings first, and she cared about the people and their lives -- not only the people she was working with but the people we were writing about."

Bramson, 33, was fairly burned out in a previous job. "Mimi put the heart back into journalism for me," she said. "I was really debating whether I was going to stay in this profession. I came to the Journal to give it another try, and I'm still in the profession because I ran into Mimi Burkhardt."

That's what I call a legacy.

M. Charles Bakst, The Journal's political columnist, can be reached by e-mail at mbakst [at] projo.com