U.S. newspapers have shed jobs at a breakneck pace in 2009. Erica Smith, a multimedia producer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s STLtoday.com, puts paper cuts on the map.

As a handful of major American newspapers close and others barely cling to life, a small but growing body of economics research supports the notion that newspapers make a difference in their communities.

Watergate legend Bob Woodward says Monday’s revelation by The New York Times that two of its journalists had a tip on the Watergate scandal that he and Carl Bernstein later exposed is not as important as what they would have done with the tip.

All this adds up to a loss of decades of experience in the Colorado Capitol press corps. It’s not just the lack of warm bodies at the press table. It’s the lack of authority.

National media-reform organization Free Press outlines policy initiatives in its strategy to shore up journalism.

Let’s face it, good journalism is expensive, and expensive is not part of the vocabulary in newspaper boardrooms. The Watergate example is just the tip of the iceberg.

The slump that has hit the newspaper industry in recent years has swallowed yet another title: Fort Collins Now.

Here we are, back again, 12 weeks after having lost the fight to save the Rocky. Since then, Rocky journalists have joined the 5.7 million people who have lost their jobs in this recession. We know we’re not alone.

Yet, like so many Americans, we’re still fighting.

We’re fighting because this battle is for more than a single newspaper, worthy as it was. The ethos we were trying to save here in Denver has been lost in Seattle and Tucson, and it’s endangered in nearly every major American city. City councils aren’t being watched; politicians aren’t being held accountable; budgets aren’t being examined; the money isn’t being followed.

This truly is a fundamental breakdown in our democratic system. The American press was born as partisan pamphlets, and it grew as the country and its government grew. Our country’s founders knew that independent journalists would be keep the government honest, or at least more honest than it would be without us. Today, that government has grown so large that the passionate pamphleteers who reported the news during Jefferson and Madison’s day are simply not enough to keep watch over it. It takes a large institution, like a newspaper or TV network, to keep watch over the much larger institution of government.

What we’re fighting for is the kind of journalism that is independent, assertive and robust enough to be the eyes and ears of the people, going into places where most do not have the time, the resources or the expertise to go themselves.

We’ve heard some people — even a few Rocky coworkers –- say we should stop fighting. Some say we should give up and go find other jobs. But this was never just a job. Journalism was worth our time last year, and it’s still worth it this year.