Has anyone noticed how many daily newspapers have gone out of business? Here's a short list of cities where newspapers have ceased publication, just within the last two years. I've only listed major cities. The number of smaller community newspapers that have gone belly-up is significantly longer.

Seattle...Denver...Detroit...San Francisco...Cinncinnati...Oakland...New York...Aspen...Omaha...Minneapolis...Kansas City...Baltimore...Las Vegas...Tucson

Other big city newspapers are on the ropes. All of the newspapers owned by The Tribune Company are in Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Those include the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Sun, Hartford Courant, Miami Sun-Sentinel, and the Orlando Sentinel. The reporting staffs at the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Boston Globe and New Yrok Times have been substantially reduced in recent months. In addition, most of those remaining have been required to take substantial pay cuts. The situation is calling into question whether we can rely on the printed news anymore. The Boston Globe was threatened with shutdown unless the employes took a big pay cut. Many financial analysts question whether even the New York Times can survive much longer.

Basically, virtually every printed newspaper in the country has either stopped publishing or is in intensive care. (Except The Villages Daily Sun, but we all know the quality of news reporting there.)

News gathering is not to be confused with opinion writing or bloviating. Opinions can be stimulating and, for the audiences at Fox News and MSNBC, cathartic, depending on their political views. We can spend hours surfing the posts of bloggers we like or despise. But nothing except a well-edited newspaper has demonstrated an ability to report and investigate news that is important to our daily lives.

It's reached the point that most of what we read these days is opinion, most often slanted in the direction chosen by the author. Opinions, however insightful or provocative and whether expressed online or in print or in prime time, are cheap to produce--often even free. Reporting and investigating the news is expensive. It's being done less and less.

Whether we've noticed or not, we're soon reaching a point in the history of the distribution of information and knowledge that is every bit as important as the invention of printing by Gutenberg.

How will you feel about finding a thorough and balanced gathering and analysis of the news, both domestic and international? Do you know where you'd look? Maybe we should begin looking, because it probably won't be long before our hour with a cup of coffee and the paper are long gone.