The newspaper habit got hold of me early. My fifth-grade teacher, Ronnie Fern, assigned the entire class to read a daily paper, choose one article from it and write some sort of commentary. It quickly became clearer than it had been theretofore that there was a wider world outside Eastern Kentucky.

The paper to which my parents subscribed was The Cincinnati Enquirer, for which by a quirk of fate I later worked. My grandparents got the Lexington Herald. When in high school I went to work during the summers at The Flemingsburg Gazette, a weekly with a circulation of about 3,000, I went through the Louisville Courier-Journal first thing every morning. At Michigan State University, I read the State News, a student paper more ambitious than many small dailies, and in graduate school I subscribed to the Herald-Journal in Syracuse. For nearly 20 years now, I have been reading The Sun every morning, typically uttering a good round oath and flinging it across the room at the discovery of some fresh error or infelicity that had slipped past the copy desk. Good or bad, I’ve read them all.

Along with my other tastes – pipe tobacco, bourbon whiskey, Anglican liturgy – this appetite for daily newspapers marks me as one of a breed headed for extinction. My undergraduate students at Loyola College can barely be encouraged to read a print newspaper at bayonet point, and their scorn for the electronic version is equally ripe. Phil Meyer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has projected – he likes a good laugh – that at the current rate of circulation decline, the last newspaper reader will die in 2044, by which point I should by all that is decent have climbed the golden staircase myself.

Yes, I look at electronic articles, skimming the Internet throughout the day. It’s not the same as sitting down in a comfortable chair each morning, with a good light and a cup of strong coffee, to survey the world’s follies. Pointing and clicking are somehow more tedious and laborious than turning pages. And though I am not some lips-moving novice frightened by rows of type, I find reading long texts on a television screen more fatiguing than on a page, where the Lord meant for type to appear.

If the printed newspaper should disappear, I would mourn it. If it should not be replaced by an electronic equivalent, I would despair.

That is because newspapers are something more than a vehicle for publishers to turn over cash to stockholders, or merchants to hawk their wares, or reporters, bless their hearts, to pass off the hackneyed forms of journalese as literary art. The newspaper has been essential to the formation of a democratic society.

Hannah Barker’s Newspapers, Politics and English Society, 1695-1855 explores how the development of newspapers both expressed and reinforced what came to be called public opinion, helping to transform subjects into citizens concerned with the governance of their country and influencing that governance.

It was newspapers that helped to realize what Alexander Hamilton, in the first number of The Federalist, called the task of the American people, "by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force."

What my colleagues and I try to do every day in The Sun is to fit the entire world into the compass of its pages. It can’t be done, but we try to include as broad a sampling of human experience as we know how to do: political news, international news, financial news, crime news, medical news, reviews of movies and restaurants, innocent amusements, all so that you, the reader, can make informed choices about your life. Choices about how to vote, how to invest your money, where to spend your money, how to talk to your children (or parents). The choices that you might otherwise make as a consequence of accident or force. We make that picture of the world as complete as we can, and we struggle to make it as correct as we can.

That is the enterprise to which I have devoted more than a quarter-century of my life, and that is the enterprise that we who share in the effort are exploring how to keep it going, on paper or in pixels.

First, though, a break. I will be gone for the next two weeks, June 12-26, for Loyola College’s summer journalism program in Cagli, Italy. Apart from tormenting the undergraduates about their prose, the great pleasures include morning cappuccino in the piazza, a glass of Prosecco at the end of the day and spirited discussion of the most important question of the day (where to dine).

But there will be no daily newspaper, and I will miss it.