I was in Grand Center and the Central West End this afternoon making the rounds as someone newly back in town, checking in with more people whom I consider to be especially thoughtful and who have a record of getting things done.

My travels took me to ostensible competitors — Dr. Donald Suggs, publisher of the St. Louis American, the influential community weekly, and the editorial staff of The St. Louis Beacon, the new non-profit news site led by distinguished journalists who spent long careers at the Post-Dispatch.

I have followed Dr. Suggs for some years and I have had a chance to talk with him before at length, and always liked him — found him to be fiercely intelligent, reasonable and genuinely interested in community life.

I have read press reports about an unhappy turn in relations between Dr. Suggs and Mayor Francis Slay (whom I also like), but Dr. Suggs and I spent most of our time talking about big picture history, trends, and challenges confronting the city and the region.

Dr. Suggs made an especially interesting observation about Barack Obama, drawing a comparison with Bill Clinton that I had not heard before:

Both men could have made a lot of money at a young age doing other things, but took career paths that had ridiculously meager prospects of national influence or personal wealth.

Clinton with his Georgetown, Yale and Oxford degrees, and Obama having graduated from Columbia and then Harvard Law School (where he was president of the law review), could have written their own tickets on Wall Street, as lawyers or investment bankers.

But rather than pursuing almost certain and substantial wealth, one decided to pursue state political office in a small, relatively poor southern state. The other became a community organizer in Chicago, then a law professor and civil rights lawyer.

After visiting with Dr. Suggs I swung by The Beacon’s fabulous newsroom in KETC-TV/Channel 9’s building in Grand Center.

Some press watchers have breathlessly posed The Beacon as a Post-Dispatch competitor, but I don’t see it that way.

To the contrary, I see the P-D, the American, and Beacon as natural allies in a competition against Facebook, NetFlix, and PlayStation.

On the business side, I think of the old saw about how, when a town has just one lawyer he or she typically starves. But when a town has two or three lawyers they all thrive.

There always is room for more well-informed community discussion, the livelier and wider and more interesting the better — for everyone.