Today marks the final edition of the King County Journal, a newspaper that, in various incarnations, has been covering suburban King County for like, a hundred years or something.

Yeah, I know: Stop the presses.

Newspapers, those rough first drafts of history, aren't supposed to just cease to exist. I worked as a reporter at the KCJ until the end of the year, then started another job. It was a lucky break; I didn't have to soldier on like my former colleagues, who began planning the final edition of the paper the day its impending closure was announced, which is sort of like arranging your own funeral.

The last few weeks there were weird. What would become of our stories, the archives, the sources we'd developed? Who would follow up on the the things we were covering? It was difficult to plan ahead, much less finish an article for tomorrow's paper. Working at a daily is all about the future, so if there's no future, what's the point?

People say local news doesn't matter anymore, and in a way, they're right. Local news doesn't matter, until it happens to you.

You can get your news from a computer monitor or a speaker or text message instead of a dead tree, but reporting the stories remains the same, and bloggers, bless them, so far aren't showing up at city council, school board meetings, or overcrowded jails and summing up what happens there for the handful of people who care. Maybe they should. Maybe one day, they will. I believe the future holds much promise for such journalists, if not for dailies like the Journal.

The trouble is, the future isn't here yet. Tomorrow, when the King County Journal is folded for the last time into tens of thousands of suburban recycling bins, there is nothing lined up to replace it. Fewer daily newspapers means fewer stories told about, by, and for the suburbs of King County, places that, I can tell you from growing up there, could use a little truth, and some truly local news, not to mention a happy ending or two, every now and then.