Love us or hate us, you’ll miss us when we’re gone

My first paying job as a reporter was at the Wisconsin State Journal while working my way through college. I wrote obituaries, covered Rotary Club speakers and occasionally was dispatched to fill in at legislative hearings that were too mind-numbingly dull for the statehouse reporters to stomach.

The grungy newsroom was overcrowded and packed with characters. There was a young courts reporter who protested her removal from a courtroom during graphic testimony in a rape case and was carried out by guards, and a cop-shop reporter who was hired during World War II when there was a shortage of men and, 30 years later, she was still scooping the competition on the 6 p.m.-to-2 a.m. shift.

These were my role models.

I covered Trisha Nixon campaigning for her father in 1972 and Maureen Reagan stumping for her dad in 1984. I interviewed Geraldine Farraro and Howard Dean. (Remember them?)

I wrote about a convention of long-haired undercover cops in Vancouver, Wash., and the mournful, measured response to a school shooting in Erfurt, Germany.

I spent a long night knocking on doors of crack houses with a woman desperately searching for her runaway daughter, and did interviews in prisons, battered women’s shelters, forest fire-fighting camps and inside the elephant house at the Denver Zoo.

I wrote stories about public officials who cheated on their expense accounts, a judge who dismissed the charges against a young mother despite the fact that the body of her newborn infant was found in a shoebox in her closet, and about workers from the Army Corps of Engineers who used privileged information to rip off an elderly landowner. (They got fired.)

I ate the cold pizza of frenzied election-night coverage and drank the Kool-aid when the bosses stood on the desks at jubilant Pulitzer celebrations promising more reporters! More photographers! More editors!

I became an editor and then a columnist, jobs that — along with reporting — were considered vital to the operation of a successful newspaper. I lived for datelines, bylines and deadlines, and I have the worry lines to prove it.

All this was possible because newspaper owners and advertisers believed in the value of professional journalists observing and sharing the human experience, holding public officials and institutions accountable, and building strong, well-informed communities.

And for decades most of them profited handsomely from the arrangement.

In recent years as the industry has been in economic free-fall, I have heard endless complaints.

Readers corner me in the grocery aisles and gripe that there’s nobody covering the school board in Littleton, Cherry Creek, Aurora. Nobody paying attention to city hall or the governor’s office. Nobody checking on the VA hospital project or the cost of health care. Nobody covering federal courts, higher education, the environment, social justice issues.

There are too many stories about the Broncos … or not enough. Too many editorials favoring Republicans … or Democrats. Too many crime stories and nobody writing about the injustice of it all. I get it.

The good news is this reflects the bond the community still has with the newspaper despite the changing landscape for journalism. Even merely occasional readers believe their local newspaper should be everywhere when they need it and everything to everybody. They want to count on it, criticize it, and clip the stories about their kids’ triumphs at the science fair or the state wrestling tournament and save them forever.

The bad news, well, isn’t it obvious?

I wish I had a glib answer to the question of how to save newspapers. All I know is local journalism is dangling by a slender thread and we’re all the worse for it.

So feel free to bellyache all you want. Mourn the loss of the movie critic, the TV critic, the food editor, the good old days.

Throw darts at the headshots of the opinion writers on these pages. Sure, they make you angry sometimes. Nobody ever agrees with all of them.

That’s the whole point. But while it’s still here, take a moment to appreciate the insights, the opinions, the willingness to hold feet to fire, the stories about your community, and the team that works 24/7 to do it all.

Because as somebody who’s heard all manner of readers’ opinions for more years than I care to count, I know one thing is certain.

You’ll miss us when we’re gone.