If newspapers ever cease to exist, someone will make a fortune reinventing them because nobody is better at finding out what’s going on in a community and letting everyone know.

Eugene Robinson is an op-ed columnist for The Washington Post. He can be reached at robinsong@washpost.com.

EVERY DAY, I GET E-MAILS FROM readers that begin, "Why have the Mainstream Media refused to report ...?" or "Why is the MSM too cowardly to tell us that ... ?" The e-mails invariably go on to cite, in considerable detail, some example of government malfeasance or political chicanery that was uncovered by a newspaper reporter doggedly working his or her beat, splashed all over the front page, and then picked up by newspapers and other media from coast to coast.

Sometimes, in my reply, I'll point out that we're obviously doing a lousy job of squelching the news item in question, since everybody seems to know all about it.

Here's my fantasy: Just once, I'll get an e-mail that begins, "Tell us, if you have the courage: Why is the traditional press covering up the fact that newspapers rock?"

No, we're not covering it up - at least, not intentionally. But maybe we're not doing the best job of putting the news about our own industry in perspective. You'd have to be a pretty careful reader of the business pages to learn, for example, that newspapers continue to enjoy profit margins that almost any other industry would die for (an average of nearly 16 percent, according to one respected analyst). That news might make the financial "briefs" column. The section front would be dominated by a feature about a new Internet venture that might, just might, make it out of the red in a few years.

Not that I'm mad at the Internet, which has become a big part of every newspaper's business model. But how many times can The Newspaper As We Know It be pronounced dead? We've already been killed off, in theory, by newsreels, radio, television, cable. To paraphrase the country song, how can people miss us if we won't go away?

Technology is an old story by now. Let me tell you an even older story.

When I arrived in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, the last poor souls were still being evacuated from the Superdome and the only way to travel through the city was by boat. In the days and weeks to come, editor Jim Amoss and the staff of The Times-Picayune literally held what was left of their city together and helped it begin to heal. In nearby Biloxi, where neighborhoods near the beach had been simply erased, editor Stan Tiner and the staff of The Sun Herald did much the same.

The newspapers gave their desperate communities a way to re-establish connections that the storm had ripped apart. Their editorials gave voice to the cities' pain, anger, determination and hope. Newspapers made sense of the inexplicable, helping all of us distinguish between damage caused by nature's fury and ruin caused by official negligence.

For their efforts, The Times-Picayune and The Sun Herald were awarded the Pulitzer Prize. But none of the reporters, editors, photographers, graphic artists and other staff members who produced all that superlative journalism gave a second thought to prizes. They had suffered from the storms, just like their readers. They had lost homes, family members, friends, acquaintances. But their first instinct, and their only instinct, was to do what newspapers do: Find out what's going on, and let people know.

Every day, in communities across the nation and around the world, newspapers perform that basic function in a way that touches people's lives in a way no other medium can. One of the classic examples, of course, is high school sports - heroism, courage, sweet victory and sour defeat, all witnessed and photographed under Friday night lights.

But at the risk of sounding, um, a little dour, my favorite illustration of how newspapers intersect with our lives is the obituary. I'm not talking about the send-offs we give the great and the grand, I'm talking about local obituaries. I think we all got the same lecture at some point in our careers: The obituary might be the only time somebody gets his name in the paper, so get it right. An obit is a mark on the world left by an individual's life, a proof of existence. Obituaries and death notices tell the story of a place through the lives of its people in a way that is uniquely vivid, detailed and permanent. Each obituary is, for some subset of readers, the most important story their newspaper has ever run.

I'm done writing obituaries for The Newspaper. We collect and present information that people want or need, and we deliver it in a way they find both useful and believable. We offer up more of this wanted, needed, useful, believable information than any other medium, by far. There's no viable substitute. If newspapers ever did cease to exist, someone would make a fortune by reinventing them.

Yes, there's always the asterisk about how newspapers have to become "platform agnostic," delivering the daily miracle not only to your doorstep but also to your computer screen, your cell phone, your iPod - oh, right, I'm being redundant, I mean the little combination computer/

cell phone/iPod thingy that people will soon be carrying around to mediate all their interactions with external reality. (I'm not looking forward to that day. I have big fingers - too big to use an iPhone. I can just barely thumb out a short note on my BlackBerry without messing up.) If we end up printing newspapers exclusively with pixels, so be it - they'll still be newspapers, because there will still be a hunger for what newspapers do.

Imagine a world in which newspapers have finally succumbed to the electronic onslaught and bitten the dust. Rather quickly, it seems to me, readers would begin to gravitate toward Web sites with content that was useful and credible. To keep their readership, those Web sites would raise their standards of reporting and editing. The very best would aggregate audiences large enough to command higher ad rates; the best of the best would put much of that money back into news gathering.

And then some farsighted publisher might get the bright idea to experiment with a new platform: Why not deliver the product in a more portable form - say, something you could tuck under your arm while you hailed a cab?

Let me suggest an ad slogan for the roll-out: Newspapers rock!