Show-of-hands time - how many of you have ever attended a city council or town board meeting? I see a few hands waving. How about during September? Not many hands left aloft.

How about every city council meeting for the last year? Last five years? Last 10?

Don't see any hands up now.

Do you know who has attended all these meetings? Reporters from this newspaper.

Like a lot of good things about this country, newspapers and the job they do on behalf of the public get taken for granted - like expecting clean water to come out of your tap when you open it. But some people think that might be changing. That newspapers are becoming more a part of the past than the future.

Yes, newspapers are encountering diffi culties these days not imagined only a few years ago.

This week is National Newspaper Week. This observance used to be a salute to the role newspapers played in keeping the public informed, but this year has been given new immediacy as we read of venerable newspapers closing, going to Webonly publication or filing bankruptcy.

That's grim news and there's more of it. But it's news that gives a distorted picture of the newspaper industry.

Most newspapers, while suffering through the same economic doldrums that nearly all businesses are experiencing, are still hard at it. Covering city council and school board meetings, reporting from the police and sheriff's stations, covering high school sports, printing honor rolls, tromping around the county fair grounds to count blue ribbons, printing obituaries and birth and engagement announcements. And lots more.

Think what your town would be like without a newspaper - we could all just blog ourselves to death - but about what?

Newspapers write the first draft of history and bloggers and the other news "aggregators" feed off that.

So, despite the changes in how we receive news these days, we still need newspapers.

And National Newspaper Week is as good a time as any to remind you, our readers, of how important newspapers are to society collectively and this community specifically.

Thanks for reading this newspaper. Thanks for patronizing advertisers choosing this newspaper to run their ads.

Thanks for caring that an important part of our democracy - that part guaranteed by the First Amendment - remains a part of the future.

David Stamps is executive director of the Hoosier State Press Association.