Got any good Scotch?

Why, we'd even settle for a six-pack of one of those unbeatable craft beers that Colorado entrepreneurs seem to produce in such incredible profusion.

Not that we see any sure cure for gloom on such a day, but you can't blame us for trying.

We were warned, of course, that the Rocky might have to close, but you can glimpse an approaching reef and still not be fully prepared for the shock of impact. We're going to miss this place - and we don't mean only our jobs, although we assure you that we'll miss them, too.

We mean we'll miss this institution, the Rocky Mountain News, whose reach and heft and role in Denver and this state extends back to their founding. Its existence colors that very history, as a matter of fact.

Say what you like about the Rocky, it was never fusty. It didn't fluff its feathers and sit there smugly on its roost. It probed and paced and prodded. It spoke out in the parlance of the day, homing in like a guided missile on the fatuous, the pompous and the self-important in politics and public life. And while this newspaper was right more often than not in its public crusades - at least as seen from our admittedly biased perspective - it could be terribly wrong and misinformed, too.

It was a newspaper, after all.

Some people say good riddance to newspapers. They say they don't need them any more given the wealth of news and information available from so many other sources. And by the way, they add, why pay for news when they can get it for free?

We understand why they've reached this conclusion, although much of the news they read on the Internet was actually gathered by professional reporters. But it's true that the proliferation of easily available sources of information in the past decade or two is an awesome phenomenon - and a wonderful one in many ways, too. In our jobs as journalists, we've relied on the Internet far more than most people do, so we hardly need to be reminded of its appeal or of its mind-boggling potential.

Still, we can't help but wonder about the future of local journalism - not of newspapers, mind you, but of journalism - on a day like today. This region is fortunate to have one major newspaper still standing in The Denver Post, but communities across the country are facing the prospect of seeing even their sole newspaper disappear or having its output radically curtailed.

And yet newspapers, more than any other medium, perform the tedious, labor-intensive task of reporting developments at local school districts, city governments, police agencies and legislatures, and pushing those issues into the public consciousness.

Local TV and radio employ good reporters who do first-rate journalism, too, but their numbers simply haven't been as large.

Good reporting is one reason democracy works at the local level. Organized, systematic journalism - with designated reporters and editors, as well as some professional code - lets citizens know what their elected leaders are doing, and, sometimes, when those leaders misbehave. The job doesn't have to be done mainly by newspapers, but that's been the case up to the present hour.

We're not suggesting newspaper reporting is free from bias or that the coverage isn't selective. But we do believe that, on average, it tends to be less biased and less arbitrarily selective than other mediums and that there is no certain successor on the horizon ready to fill its shoes.

So this is our fervent hope: that, if newspapers are fated for a mass thinning of their ranks, credible alternatives emerge that we cannot now foresee. Credible, independent voices, we should add, not ones dependent on government largess and thus the pressures of political fancy.

Already there are Web sites doing a decent job specializing in certain forms of local news and commentary. But none comes close to having the impact and reach of a traditional mass-marketed daily.

We wish we weren't publishing our final editorials today (here and in the commemorative section on Page S51), but the shifting economics of our business leave us no choice. To those of you who read us faithfully to the end - who cared enough to catch us in error or muddled thinking, or to send us an occasional note of support - we offer a thousand thanks. Our appreciation will endure as long as our memories of the Rocky.

This state will never see the likes of it again.