There's an old cheesy Chicago song with the lyric "you don't know what you've got/until it's gone/and I found out/a little too late..." I keep replaying this little ditty when I think about the demise of the Rocky Mountain News. Close to 150 years of journalism in a town that's seen horse drawn carriages give way to trolleys and then cars; 150 years of reporting the news of the old and the new west. And now it's just gone. Gone baby gone.

A member of my immediate family is a columnist for a Midwestern daily. He's watched-winced-as one paper then another then another fall prey to deficits and declining ad revenues and subscriptions. I can say, with pride, that this family member worked like a dog to get where he is, starting at a small paper in Tennessee then moving on to a larger paper in Virginia, then finally coming to rest at his current desk. He's won numerous prestigious awards for his intrepid journalism and his penchant for sniffing out a story in places some dare not go-and for securing sources many only dream of. His is a trusted name in the news business. And it's evident that he loves what he does-but these days, loving the reporter's life gets you a bellyache. And a nervous condition.

We've been corresponding, this relative and I, and in the course of those wanderings have partially unpacked the seeming ignorance of the general public when it comes to news generation. I am of the (inanely named) X Generation, raised in the Age of the Computer, and the World Wide Web has been my go-to source for everything from music to recipes to directions to dinner reservations for as long as I can remember. It wasn't until my 30s that I started reading news online, or tracking bloggers. I was a newspaper and periodical girl. I liked paper, the tactileness of it, writing in ink and not pixels. Call me old fashioned. Call me behind the times. Just don't call me Jared Polis (D-Boulder).

I've had friends ask me "wait--you actually read the paper?" like I'm generationally-challenged or live in a hole with my black and white television sporting rabbit ears wrapped in tin foil. Yes, I say, and most of the time that's the end of it. Some people push on... "Well, you know you can read the paper on the internet," my answer to which is to stare at them blankly, nod, and grunt an Uh huh. (I need a bone for my hair, á la Wilma Flintstone.) I don't want to read the paper on the internet. What's so hard to understand about that?

There is a resistance, it seems, to recognizing the interconnectedness of our news sources coupled with a lack of understanding the true genesis of this information. Where does the internet get its news? The newspaper, the AP wire. Where does TV get its news? Same place. National Public Radio? MSNBC? CSPAN? All the news regurgitated by these various outlets has one thing in common: it started with one word, then one sentence, then a stream of sentences that made a lede and grew into a story. Behind it all is a human being, writing. Most of the time, it's for a regional newspaper.

Dailies and their legions of reporters are on the front line of news gathering, yet it seems that some folks imagine news simply APPEARING from the great ether. And then there's the bloggers and the severely self-conscious blogosphere, which is anybody's game. May we all find another planet if we're ready to exalt bloggers to a rarified position as News Creators, because when the words sputter out and the ashtray is full and the pack empty, they have to go out into the bright light of day, like all of us, just another Denver inhabitant apprehending disparate parts of a nonsensical world in hyperdrive slowing it down, chewing on it, making some sense out of it. Many don't know squat about honest, hard, hard won reporting, but they like to play reporter on the 'net.

News is about interconnectivity, but it's as if, in our recognition of this, in the very acknowledgment of it, "we" (the collective) are somehow implicated in its demise - because we've not supported it, because we have not taken the time to understand how the dailies drive and deliver the news. Instead, we choose to believe the information superhighway and t.v. and the radio are *magic*. How convenient. Willful ignorance takes center stage, wearing a t-shirt that says "Hey, it's not MY problem!" This ignorance; it's the new black.

So many people I know care deeply about where their food comes from. They want to know the source of their clothing, whether or not it's made from organic cotton in places that don't support sweatshops, whether or not an animal had to die a horrible death to produce a pair of shoes. The make of one's car is somehow a reflection of one's character (and God forbid you get caught in your rich cousin's Hummer), especially if they have any friends or relatives employed by the American auto industry. But when it comes to the news? Talk about a contradiction. It seems that our consumerist behaviors drop off when it's intellectual consumption we're talking about as opposed to what half-and-half we're putting in our fair trade, shade grown coffee. We insist on cradle-to-grave scrutiny for the FDA and the meat industry and the auto industry--but when it comes to the news? When it comes to the information that shapes our discourse with each other and the world? Bah. Our computer/t.v./radio will deliver for us, though maybe not to our front door.

Up early one morning last weekend, I went out and counted the number of bagged papers on front porches on my block. Out of approximately 18 residences, 9 of them had a paper. Some may have been retrieved already, but I think that number is about right. Later that day, I was shopping at Sunflower in NW Denver when a man approached me and asked me if I took the paper. "I do," I replied, and he seemed shocked. "That's great," he said, then added "thank you for your support," and I went back to selecting my lemons. A few minutes later, I passed the man again and he gave me two thumbs up and a big smile. I felt like I was part of an old club that was prowling for new members because attrition had claimed the bulk of them. I suppose that's what I am, and for the life of me I can't understand why there's not a wait list for this particular club, and lines out the door at our events, and new chapters opening all over the country. Instead, the phrase "Stop the presses!" has taken on a whole new meaning. And we found out a lot too late.