Dear Readers: I love you madly, and need you, all of you -- even the ones who write the nasty e-mails and who claim they hate the Sun (even though they read it free, on-line every day). The reporters and editors of The Sun need you. Baltimore and Maryland and these United States of America need you. We need you to keep reading what you find here, either in print or on-line, and stay on top of things. Democracy dies if you do not stay informed.

Of course, there are many ways to stay informed today -- magazines, urban and suburban weeklies, TV, radio and the Internet. But you need to have some faith in what you read. You need to trust it. I have worked at The Sun since 1976, and in the newspaper business since 1973, and I need to say this: The vast majority of the people I have worked with over those years (reporters, editors and photographers) have been diligent, professional, conscientious, intelligent, well-read, well-informed, thoughtful people blessed with the energetic instinct to know more, to uncover problems. They are good citizens; they care about their community, the state of affairs, and the world of ideas.

We're not perfect. We make mistakes. But the people I know, and have known, in the collegial atmosphere of The Sun newsroom all try very damn hard to get it right and get it fast.

The Sun still produces most of the news for our region of the country. What you see on local TV, what you hear on local radio -- 80 or maybe 90 percent of it starts with the enterprising work of Sun reporters.

When I got into the newspaper business, veterans of the city desk told me to get out of it. Television promised to be an ever-expanding universe of news and programming, and the broadcasting industry, they warned, would kill newspapers. That still hasn't happened. In fact, it's likely that, because of the dogged enterprise of newspaper reporters and the investment of newspaper companies in journalistic manpower, the TV industry, especially the local affiliates, have been able to pull back on their own commitment to news coverage. Radio news would almost certainly not exist without the Sun providing the lion's share of daily reporting in this region.

You have heard the news of the Tribune sale to Mr. Zell. I hope the sale of the Trib papers, including the Sun, into private ownership takes us back to a day when the owners of newspapers believed in two things -- turning a reasonable profit and serving the public good -- and understood that the two are not mutually exclusive.

"The danger in this environment is that newspaper owners will 'eat their seed corn,' that is, cut back so deeply in order to maintain profitability that they destroy their chances of long-term survival, because they eventually produce a paper that has so little value that readers drop it," Mike Hoyt, executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, says in today's Sun.

We need you, readers. We need you to keep reading.

And we need you to either subscribe to the paper again or, if that doesn't work, we probably need you to buy our product on-line.

I am no expert on the communications industry today; changing as it does at warp speed, I mostly keep my head down and do my work. But I don't understand why we continue to give away for free what we work so hard to create, and what is so costly to produce -- that is, the bulk of the daily news, sports and arts coverage for this region, original and exclusive.

You might be asked one day to buy the Sun on-line. I don't understand why you haven't been. (Maybe the Sirius/XM thing has the experts worried.) It would seem to me that those of us who want to stay informed -- and save the trees that produce the newsprint -- ought to be willing to pay, say, 25 cents a day for a reliable on-line regional news service.  And advertisers ought to be willing to pay for the impressive exposure they're getting on these pages.

I don't usually comment on my own industry, and no publisher of vice-president has ever asked my opinion. I am sure they've been "looking at" the Internet as a source of revenue to keep quality journalism alive in our region. It seems to me the most obvious and logical answer, and we need to get up to speed. We love you. We love to serve you. But I don't think the product of our labors should be free.