I read the news today, oh boy.

The Beatles were singing that lyric about the time the Rocky came into my life. I was a college student in Boulder and bought the Rocky for a dime most mornings between classes.

For the past 24 years, I've worked in this newsroom, the past three of them in the online province, creating a dialogue with our readers.

A newspaper has a pulse. The Rocky's economic pulse stops beating today, but the pulse of its soul will endure for ages, in the people we helped, the people we prodded, the stories we told, the pictures we made.

We gave you our best, from the biggest, showiest efforts to the workaday grind of producing a new product every 24 hours; from getting the governor's quotes right to spelling your child's name correctly in a high school sports report that became the most important thing in the day's paper.

The most profound sadness I feel is that this group of people will never again produce this brand of journalism.

Some of us will stay in the business. Some of us will leave it.

This is a tough time to work for newspapers, but you don't get to pick the career you fall in love with.

Newspapers are the last cheap date in America. The Rocky costs less than a candy bar. A recent edition contained 48 staff stories; 13 columns (most of them local); 20 national/world stories from The Associated Press; two local cartoons; 33 obituaries; two editorials; seven letters to the editor; various briefs, notes and graphics; 26 high school box scores with more than a dozen local kids' names in each one; plus standings, scores and summaries from every professional sporting contest played the night before. Not to mention the ads, God bless them, touting sales and bargains

It's foldable, portable and soaks up spills. Maybe we should have hired one of those kitchenware pitchmen to tout the Rocky in late-night infomercials.

We went to boring meetings just in case someone you elected did something significant with your tax money. We told you stories that were by turns light, bright and tragic. When we made a mistake, we fessed up, prominently, on Page 2. We reported on games in the biggest stadiums in the land and the smallest towns in the state.

Alas, our business model no longer made economic sense to our owners.

And now, we're gone.

Denver and Colorado would have been a far less vital place to live without the Rocky Mountain News.

We hope it will live in your hearts.

We know it will live in ours.

Mark Wolf pioneered the role as host of the Rocky's Web site, leading a conversation between the paper and its readers.