Sense of loss for integral part of community

At 10:37 a.m. on Nov. 2, 2009, the words came that 140 people had feared for months: At the end of the year, the East Valley Tribune will cease operations.

It is the story we hoped we would never have to report, but one that appears today in print, as it did Monday online.

The Tribune, which traces its roots as far back as 1891, when the Weekly Evening Free Press was founded in Mesa, no longer will publish print editions or operate its Web site, evtrib.com, after this year.

Dec. 30 will be the final print edition.

The decision to close the Tribune by its parent, Irvine, Calif.-based Freedom Communications, comes as the company is working to emerge from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

The struggles of this nation's newspaper industry, coupled with the hammer leveled by the deep national recession, have been well-documented. Our coverage by veteran Tribune reporter Ed Taylor explains it all quite well in our news stories.

I won't bother rehashing things here. Suffice to say, absent an 11th-hour bid that the company feels is reasonable, the operation will shut down.

Needless to say, there were many pained faces and tears among the 140 people who work at the Tribune, most at our main office and production facility in downtown Mesa. While most understood the company's situation left us in a tenuous situation, it was no less shocking when the decision to close the Tribune was announced.

There was the obvious pain of knowing that jobs will be lost - the second time in a year that about 140 people employed by the Tribune will have lost jobs.

But there was something more, I sensed, in a lot of folks.

It's a sense of loss that something that has been an integral part of this community - first and foremost in Mesa, then those cities that surround it - will be gone forever.

It has often been said that a newspaper writes the first draft of history. The Tribune has been doing that around here for more than a century.

The outpouring of comments posted on our site under our story about this has not gone unnoticed. Many of you have expressed sorrow at the announcement, reminding us how much a part of your lives we have been. For that, we are more thankful than you'll ever know.

Others have not been as nice, preferring to say we are getting what we deserve because we were either too liberal, too right-wing, too hard on Sheriff Joe, too community-focused, not focused on the community enough, or too slow to jump on the online bandwagon. I could quibble with all of them, but I won't. We're grateful for everyone who takes the time to send us feedback, good or bad. So we thank all of you as well.

We've received many thoughtful notes privately from readers, more than a few from competitors and an untold number from former colleagues who have worked here recently or generations ago. Many of those latter notes have moved us in ways we didn't expect, reminding us how much people feel they are part of something bigger when they work at the local newspaper. We thank them all.

In the coming weeks, the Tribune will continue to provide coverage of the news and information you have come to rely on, both in print and online. But we won't pretend that what's happening here isn't happening. That's why we intend to give you periodic coverage in print and online that highlights some of the history of our coverage and examines issues that will remain important after we're gone. We will do our best to guide you on how you can best continue to follow many issues.

As part of our coverage, I invite you all to share with us any memories you may have of the Tribune - a story we did, a picture we ran, a headline you saw. Maybe you worked here at one time, or maybe you just enjoyed reading the paper. Maybe you just have thoughts about what it means to lose a local paper.

We intend to publish as many as we can through the end of this year. I hope many of you will take us up on this offer. Send them to newstips@evtrib.com. I encourage you to provide a name and city of residence that we can include.

It has always been you, our readers, who have mattered most to us. It is with that continuing truth in mind that we now enter the chapter we hoped would never come.