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NEWSPAPERS may be down but they're not out. They've been battered and bloodied, but in the tradition of good club fighters made famous by Rocky Balboa, they know the key to winning is getting up one more time than they get knocked down. That's a message to savor with your morning cuppa Joe this Newspaper Week as we celebrate the publishers, editors, photographers, artists, cartoonists, columnists, and reporters - most of all the reporters - who bring the world to millions of doorsteps every day.

Some of print journalism's wounds have been self-inflicted to be sure, others the result of an economic downturn unique enough to have been given its own nickname: the Great Recession. Some papers have closed, and more likely will close before the ink on the current economic malaise has dried.

Some of the county's best-known nameplates - the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune - have filed for bankruptcy protection. Other signature newspapers - including the Miami Herald, the Boston Globe, and the Sacramento Bee - are in financial trouble.

It's become fashionable, therefore, to write the newspaper industry's obituary, likening print's massive presses, fleets of trucks, and battalions of paperboys (and men and women and girls) to an aging lion toppled from its throne by the strength, speed, and vigor of a young lion called the Internet.

Fashionable, but a little premature.

Newspapers and wire services have tens of thousands of skilled reporters deployed every day, in every corner of the world, gathering the day's events, keeping an eye on governments big and small to make sure your right to know is protected, investigating businesses as well as nonprofits to make sure you're getting a square deal, and reporting on the foibles of famous and infamous alike to satisfy the public's more prurient interests.

No one else does that. Television networks have to cherry pick the events they cover or depend on "citizen-journalists" because they don't have nearly enough real reporters to be everywhere.

The bloggers who in their thousands are scattered across the supposedly free Internet reproduce, aggregate, and comment upon stories primarily paid for and reported on by print journalism. The Rush Limbaughs and Rachel Maddows, Sean Hannitys and Keith Olbermanns, Glenn Becks and Ed Schultzs, many of whom delight in blaming the media for all the country's ills, fill their bank accounts by using and abusing news they read on wire services that depend on journalists for their content.

Without print journalists, television news would be a mere shell of itself, bloviators would have considerably fewer platforms on which to display their narcissism - not that that would stop them - and there would be virtually no news on the Internet. It's just that simple.

As for democracy, well, if it weren't for journalists - however flawed they are in their own right - watching democracy's store, many of the rights Americans take for granted as inalienable would likely prove very alienable within a generation. One need only look at the attacks on basic liberties in the months after 9/11 or the recent revelations about "fusion centers" to get a taste of what government does even when people are watching.

The French philosopher Voltaire once said, "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him." The same could be said of newspapers: If they didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent them as well.

In fact, they're already reinventing themselves all across the country. Nobody - not even owners and publishers - really knows what they'll look like when the process is complete. They may look as different from each other as they look like today, and the transformative influence of the technology that runs the Web, while undeniable, is also still in its infancy.

But you can be sure of one thing: 20 years from now, people will still be getting the most comprehensive information about the world from men and women called journalists through a medium called newspapers. You can take that to the bank, and you can say you read it here - in a newspaper.

Kendall F. Downs is a Blade associate editor.

Contact him at: kdowns@theblade.com

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