The loyal supposition

And now we press pause, again, on the doings of Sportsball World, which this morning includes Joe Burrow (Cincinnati), Tua Tagovailoa (Miami) and Justin Herbert (Los Angeles Chargers), who found their professional homes last night in the first round of the NFL Draft.

Oh, and with the No. 3 pick, the Lions took a cornerback to replace the Pro Bowl cornerback they traded away (Darius Slay) for three magic beans and a sixer of Vernors.

But enough about that.

First, let's have a moment of silence.

Let's have a moment of silence as another daily newspaper goes under, this one right here in the Fort. The News-Sentinel effectively ceased operations yesterday when it furloughed the only remaining staffer, longtime reporter and columnist (and my college roomie) Kevin Leininger.

 Management, spinning like Dorothy Hamill, characterized this merely as a "staff adjustment." Which is kind of like the captain of the Titanic saying the stern section of the ship was perfectly capable of continuing on after the bow section went to the bottom.

In any event, from the perspective of someone who worked across the hall at The Journal Gazette, the loyal opposition is gone. Only the loyal supposition survives, apparently.

This is more bad news in the continuing cascade of bad news for my former profession, which has been diligently trying to Kevorkian itself for years now. This would not be so appalling if my former profession manufactured widgets. But local journalism is the foundation of the Fourth Estate in any society worth the bother, and local journalism has mostly best been practiced by the ink-stained wretches.

In other words, it's the newspaper grunts who most often break the big stories in a market the size of the Fort. It's the newspaper grunts who are the most diligent guardians of the public trust. And two newspapers are always better than one.

We had our battles, the N-S and the JG. And that was good for everyone, because those battles made us better, and I like to think they made the N-S better.

On the sports side, at least, that never resulted in us throwing rocks at one another, which was mostly a function of the commonality we shared as sports guys. We were all subject to the same nonsense: Crummy weather, cramped pressboxes, grumpy coaches and laptops that did heinous things to us at the worst possible time. We bonded over Boiler Dogs at Purdue and porkburgers at 'Busco.

That's mostly because there were profoundly decent people on both sides of the hall, and some astonishing talent as well. One of my best friends in the business, the legendary Steve Warden, started out as my opposite number as the N-S's sports columnist. Later, when he jumped to the JG, we shared adjoining cubicles -- and also an unshakeable belief that every situation in life can best be explained by a quote from "Young Frankenstein," "Blazing Saddles" or "The Big Lebowski."

Now all of that is gone. And the Fort is ill-served by it. Fewer ink-stained wretches holding public figures accountable means more public figures who need to be held accountable.

And that ain't good, folks. That ain't good at all.