It was announced by twit: The Denver Post would be cutting 30 people from its newsroom, a third of its staff. That’s 30 more people, as it’s the third round of cutting in the past two years.

The Denver Post recently cut 10 positions in 2017, according to the Denver Business Journal. More than 20 staffers also took buyouts or were laid off in 2016, according to Westword.

It was a good newspaper, the major paper of Denver, which is a real city and should have a real paper. Now it will be a shell. The paper is owned by a hedge fund, Digital First Media, which is being blamed for putting profit above people, savings above mission. But then, newspapers are cutting, closing all over. And not just old dead tree papers, but digital media as well. And the ones that remain are too often staffed by children, who work cheap and know nothing, with maybe a star journalists here or there to maintain the facade of credibility.

Is this okay? Kevin O’Keefe saw it as an opportunity.

The closing of newspapers does not mean the end of meaningful news. The news may even be better.

News is really what someone tells us – that’s it.

When the means of capturing and reporting the news was in the hands of the few — newspapers, radio, television — we got our news from a few sources.

That’s changed with smartphones, laptops, blogs, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube and more.

He has a point, that we know what’s “news” because Walter Cronkite said so. And the old days of newspaper photographers bringing us our only visual proof that news existed are somewhat gone, now that so much of our visual information comes from random pics and videos taken by the people who were there when “news” happened.

If you’re over 65 you may watch news on television and read it in newspapers. Not those thirty or forty and younger. In fact, they’re capturing and reporting the news on a smartphone in addition to watching it on a smartphone.

This conflates news watching and gathering, two entirely different functions. But old folks waited for the news to be brought to them. Younger folks may be part of the creation of news process. So the demise of the Denver Post isn’t so much a bad thing as a natural progression from the days when there was a press to the days when we are the press?

Little question the news today spread faster with more detail and emotion than newspapers and television stations could equal. National and local news will even call on citizen journalist’s tweets for pictures and video footage of the walkout to include in their own coverage.

The speed of the news cycle is one problem pushing newspapers out of the picture. By the time the morning paper reaches the front door, important news has already made it ’round the world.

Yes, newspapers are on the decline — and yes, we’ll lose something if they all but disappear. But citizen journalism may provide us with something better.

In their effort to capture our sad tears, which may connect to our wallet, reporters have dropped any pretense of objectivity in order to feed us what we want to believe. They call it advocacy journalism, which is the cool way to say news with the political spin we want you to have; news with the political spin you want to consume. Does that make it “better”?

Most of us say, “this is better, therefore I like it.”

In fact, the converse is what actually happens. “I like it, therefore I’m assuring you (and me) that this is better.”

Despite the shortcomings of trying to make a buck in a troubling market, newspapers had reporters go out and cover stories that we need to know, even if they weren’t sexy or salacious. If no one takes a video and posts it on Youtube today, will a story exist?

If the retelling of the story is by a random “citizen journalist,” can you believe its accuracy? Can you trust the person on the street to tell the truth, or “their truth”? Did they collect the facts? Did they recite the facts? Are they even capable of grasping the facts? How the hell would you know?

Legacy media has fallen on hard times. Not just its business model, and its inability to find a new business model that will support a staff of reporters doing the legwork of reporting, but in its ability to find and hold an audience. Journalists lie to themselves that they feel their truth and need to make sure their stories reflect it, so that the groundlings only learn the news in a way that informs us that their truth is the real truth.

We read them because we like them, because they tell us what we want to know. They confirm our bias, they validate our truth. If the New York Times says so, who are we to doubt it? We wear it like armor as we fight the war of alternate realities on social media, secure that anyone who alleges any claim we dislike is wrong as long as our preferred media says we’re right.

But what’s the alternative to advocacy journalism, to feeding us stories we already want to read and believe? Citizen journalism? People who claim to be citizen journalists are most often the ones wearing tin foil hats. They aren’t just unreliable and incompetent, but usually nutjobs with an axe to grind. Maybe they are credible, smart, thorough and accurate in a given circumstance, but there would be no way for us to know. It’s not as if they have to go through any editorial review, to prove their sources, to establish that their facts are facts.

Newspapers aren’t great sources of facts anymore. And they’re also bad business, no longer our necessary go-to source if we want to stay abreast of the important happenings of our world. But without them, no one will gather facts, cover the mundane things that provide the foundation of knowledge for our ability to make critical assessments about our world.

Without trustworthy reporting, we’re not merely poorer, but ignorant. Much as I love a Youtube video as much as the next guy, citizen journalism is not a substitute for the heavy lifting of “real” journalism. And “real” journalism, bad as it’s become, will be sorely missed.